The Story of Things: Where They Come From and Where They End Up
Do you know what the soil is made from? That never crossed my mind, until I realized I didn’t know. Page 19, Chapter 2, “What the rocks contribute” of “The Web of Life” by John H. Storer answered the question before I even asked it.
I got this book, self-proclaimed to be the “first book of ecology”, from Powell’s City of Books, also a self-proclaimed “world’s largest independent bookstore” in Portland. It took me a few months before I actually got around to the first page — the smell of secondhand books still fresh as I lift open the cover. Now how is paper made? We use paper everyday, but still I don’t know — I never thought about it, and I doubt most people have.
Now we know paper is made from trees, trees which grow on soil — but how are they really made and where do they come from? One question led to the other: what about toilet paper? And when we’re done wiping and proceed to flushing, where does it go next? To the sewage, sure, but how does our plumbing system work and how does our wastewater get treated? Is it dumped right into the river, the one whose fish we eat and water we drink?
Question after question, of which the first one sparked an endless stream of curiosity. I thought for a while, there’s no way I could find out all of this — except, I could. So I did.
After learning what the soil is made of from Storer’s story of the earth we live on — wind, water, and weather erode rocks, time and nature kills animals and decomposes organic material, and soil is born — I set out to answer my life’s burning question: where does toilet paper (and other things) come from, and where does it end up?
I decided to build a mission around it. To find out, I went to the public library — just kidding, there’s this thing called the internet now, so I just went on Google and searched: “how toilet paper made”.
The results were shocking. Thirty seven gallons of water goes into making a single roll of our ass-wiping commodity — we are currently facing one of humanity’s biggest (and many) threats, water scarcity, and we are using this much water to clean my bum, not to mention more to flush it down the drain and even more to clean it before dumping it in our polluted rivers?
And that was just the first link that appeared on the search on the first page! And there are over 130 trillion pages on Google that we never wander into! Imagine what other dark truths lie beyond!
To understand how this could possibly be, that I am basically stealing drinking water from thirsty kids in Africa and using it to clean my bum, I did more research into the steps in producing toilet paper or what is technically referred to as the “supply chain”. Scrolling through, I came across research papers: natural forests are cut to make way for plantations, trees are planted (mainly eucalyptus like the kind koalas like), trees are cut, logs are sent to manufacturing plants where they’re chipped, soaked in chemicals, mushed into paper mache-like substance, rolled out, dried with extreme heat, flattened and whirled into the rolls we notice when someone puts the tube in the wrong way.
The papers also included a section of what is called a “life cycle analysis” — the supply chain with environmental or social impacts explained in each procedure along the process from extraction of raw materials, its production and consumption, all the way to its disposal — and what it revealed to me turned my world upside down.
Am I really such an ignorant, irresponsible and destructive human being to the world? Do my sanitary needs really contribute to, if not cause, the chopping down of 27,000 trees to produce toilet paper every year? Even in the moments when someone finishes the last sheet without refilling it, how did I not even consider to question this reckless use of our natural resources?
I guess it’s easy to forget to ask, when all you do is pick up a pack of six rolls from the 9th aisle of your local supermarket, pay for it and bring it home, just to feel its velvet touch on your butt cheeks for a mere three seconds before dropping it into the bowl and flushing it goodbye and never see you again.
Everything — whether it’s the electricity and water we use, the vegetables we eat, the clothes we wear or the garbage we throw — comes from somewhere and ends up somewhere. Your food doesn’t just miraculously appear when you open the door of supermarket freezers and your lamp doesn’t just magically light up when you flick on the switch. Everything we consume — whether it’s the electricity and water we use, the vegetables we eat or the clothes we wear — required energy for it to be there at our convenience.
Did you know that it takes 1,432 liters to produce 1 kg of rice? Actually, do you even know how rice is grown? Until I googled it, I didn’t know farmers have to 1) plough soil to prepare the land, 2) irrigate the land, 3) spread seeds on the field and wait for it to sprout, 4) remove weeds by hand, 5) add chemical fertilizers and spray pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and more to keep pests away, then 6) drain the field, 7) harvest the rice, and lastly 8) “thresh” and “winnow” the grains and many more detailed steps in between.
And I’ve eaten rice three times a day almost everyday since I’ve been born. My parents have always told me to finish my food, but I guess I never truly understood exactly how much was going to waste leaving those last few spoons of rice for the trash can.
At our disposal, things don’t disappear, going back to our 5th grade physics class and the Law of Conservation of Mass: all matter is neither created nor destroyed. Rice — which is responsible for up to 10% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to a study by Oxfam and CE Delft — once thrown away, also continues to pollute. Food waste contributes up to 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — we’re actually warming up the planet by simply taking too much on our plate.
Now this isn’t only about wasting natural resources and time — it’s also about taking away from people. Roughly a third of all food produced for consumption in the world are wasted — compare that to the 815 million people who are suffering from hunger. And despite the fact that rice is one of Thailand’s top exports — holding approximately 20–25 percent global market share — and that some 60 percent of its population are farmers, almost half of its farming households are living below poverty line.
The bottom line is: everything comes from somewhere and they end up somewhere. Maybe it isn’t taken from your city directly, or dumped by your neighbor, but remember, this is our home and everything on it is all our shared property. It is unfortunate we’ve grown so detached from the land we grow on and the people that feed us, but with the internet we can surf, books we can read, and people we can talk to, it has never been easier to educate, inform, and change ourselves to be mindful of what we consume while encouraging others to become more conscious too.
It starts by noticing an ordinary commodity in your life, oftentimes what we take for granted, something we wouldn’t know we had until it’s gone. Then questioning where it comes from or where it ends up, how it’s made or who made it, then finding out the answer and sharing it with people around you. It all starts with a small spark of curiosity and care for the home and planet you live on.
