It Ain't Easy Peeing Green

By Nicole McClelland, Orion Magazine. Posted November 13, 2006.

Honey, could you please bring me the tissues out of my bag?" I called from the bathroom in the rundown backpackers' hostel. Dan and I had paid two extra American dollars for en suite facilities, and I'd sat down on the toilet without noticing that there was nothing to wipe with. Tiny ants patrolled the cracks between the sink and the wall and the wall and the floor. A few lizards took turns scurrying across the ceiling. I eyed them sharply.

"What for?" Dan asked through the door.

"What do you mean, 'what for'?" I called back, laughing quietly in spite of myself.

From the moment our escape-the-States-before-the-careers-and-babies trip started, my intended and I spent a lot of time talking about toilets. We had recently graduated from college and set off on a splendid six-month vacation that would culminate in a Fijian wedding. We were free of mortgage and debt obligations. We had our youth. We had big dreams and birth control. Before we left, Dan had taken a Southeast Asia guidebook out of the library and given me a quick course in distant culture. I'd learned, among other things, that people in Thailand, our first stop, don't traditionally use toilet paper. But I'd forgotten.

"They don't use toilet paper here, remember?" he yelled from the other side of the door. He turned it into a song: "I already told you that, but you... weren't... listeniiinnng!"

"Please just give me the tissues," I pleaded.

He didn't respond.

"Dan?"

"What?"

"Get me my tissues!"

"No," he said solemnly. "Use the water gun, like you're supposed to." And I heard him walk away.

I looked around and saw a sprayer, like the one on my mother's kitchen sink, hitched to the side of the toilet. I picked it up, aimed it directly into the bowl, and squeezed the trigger. A powerful stream of water shot out. Satisfied that I had conducted a successful test of the equipment, I directed the device at my crotch and squeezed again.

Fancy Western hotels in Thailand have amenities like toilet paper, and as crappy as our hostel was, it was at least fancy enough to have sit-down toilets. At the Bangkok train station, however, I had no choice but to leave my silly American pretensions at the bathroom door and squat. I managed to pee on my jeans and spill all over myself the plastic bowl of foul water that was provided in lieu of a water gun.

Dan smiled broadly as I walked through the exit, all wet spots and irritation. "You peed your pants," he said, kissing me on the cheek.

"I'm never using a squat toilet again," I told him. I waited for a moment, ready to fight, but he spared me a repeat performance of the "people who use squat toilets don't get hemorrhoids because they don't strain their anuses as much" lecture.

"And I'm carrying tissues from now on."

"Oh, come on." He laughed at me. "That's a waste of paper."

"Don"t give me that shit," I said. "We use toilet paper when we're at home. You've used toilet paper your entire life."

He stopped smiling. "Yeah, but that doesn't mean there's not a better way." He was suddenly earnest, prepared to explain poignant environmental truths to his liberal arts graduate partner. I was a soft hippie, the sort who recycles and turns off the water when teeth-brushing, and I wanted to do more. But I had been raised in all the comforts a yuppie could afford, and wasn't as prepared as perhaps either one of us had thought I would be to abandon them. Dan readied his hands for the gesturing that accompanies his recitations on why he studied ecology and engineering, on the way that the marriage of science and conservation will beget the future of the Earth.

Though toilet paper was invented in China in the late 1300s, it was for emperors only, and everyone else around the globe used everything from corncobs to wool to newspaper to lace for the next five centuries. Widespread use of toilet paper didn't catch on until New York's Joseph Gayetty started selling it in 1857, with his name printed on every sheet. Now the U.S. alone uses 7.4 million tons of tissue per year -- over 20,000 sheets of toilet paper per person, according to Charmin -- and North America, which contains less than 7 percent of the world's population, consumes half the world's tissue paper products. By Greenpeace's estimates, Canada would save nearly 50,000 trees a year if every household in the country replaced just one roll of regular toilet paper with the recycled kind.

See more stories tagged with: toilet, ecological

Nicole McClelland and her husband spent six months exploring organic farming, alternative waste management, and sustainable relationship practices in the South Pacific prior to their wedding. The couple currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Environment! Sign up now »