Can Toilet Paper Mania Change the Way We Think About … Poop?
By Regin Winther Poulsen MA ‘20
We don’t like to talk about it, see it, or smell it, but we all do it. Poop, that is. And if we can’t avoid the odor and sometimes even end up glancing at that turd, we surely don’t want to touch it. Luckily, most Americans have access to modern-style toilets, and toilet paper, and after relieving ourselves, we just flush our problems away.
That we can’t imagine a life without the convenience of these handy pooping tools is clearer than ever, as the nation has witnessed an outbreak of toilet paper mania triggered by the COVID-19 crisis. But Americans did not always poop, wipe, or flush the way we do now, and some experts believe that the pandemic may prompt more efficient, safer, and climate-friendly ways to get rid of our human waste.
Before 1880, most Americans had an “intimate relationship with their excrement,” writes Daniel Gerling, an associate professor at Augustana University, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the history of that relationship. In his office in South Dakota, he has one of “Doctor Young’s Rectal Dilators”, a late-19th century plastic tool meant for dilating the rectum, so pooping would be easier. He also has a small figure of Tlazolteotl, an Aztec Goddess for fertility and birth. The goddess is often pictured as squatting and giving birth, but sometimes she is defecating, which to Gerling is a symbol of how important excrement as a fertilizer was for the Aztecs. He has a tattoo of the goddess on his upper left arm. Gerling is all about poop.
Not only Aztecs, but Americans used human excrement as fertilizer, before they started flushing it away. In New York, where people were using outhouses, companies like the Lodi Manufacturing Company were paid by the city to “haul off the scavenged night soil.” The company would then turn the excrement into bricks that could be used for fertilization. Similar systems were in place in Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Human waste was important for farming.
During the Civil War, more than half of the soldiers died from disease, rather than from battle wounds. And according to an official government report published in 1861, “There is no more frequent source of disease, in camp life, than inattention to the calls of nature. Habitual neglect of nature’s wants will certainly lead to disease and suffering.” Strict rules were put in place; soldiers even were punished for defecating in the woods. “This was the first large scale attempt…to try to regulate the way that people pooped,” Gerling explains.
The Civil War heightened understanding that sanitation led to saving lives and prompted cities to start building sewage systems in the second half of the 19th century. Subsequently, the value of excrement as a fertilizer plummeted. “People thought: this disgusting thing — and they did find it disgusting then too — I can just flush it and get rid of it. That’s fantastic. I want that,” Gerling explains.
When toilets moved into houses at the end of the century, plumbing and domestic manuals, which were written for women, detailed how they should remove excrement from the house. The belief was that the stench from the excrement would cause sickness, and that it was important for women to keep the house clean of the smell.
We still worry about that today. But these terrifying weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic have not caused panic in the way we poop as much as in the way we wipe.
Before the toilet, popular wipers were corn-cobs, leaves or newspapers. “The Sears catalog very famously used to come with a hole in the corner, and that hole was for you to hang it up by a nail in your outhouse,” says Shawn Shafner, an artist who founded “The POOP Project,” aimed at changing the way we talk about poop.
Paper produced for wiping dates back to medieval China. The first American producer of toilet paper was Joseph Gayetty, who in 1857 produced it as a medical supply meant for helping against hemorrhoids. According to the website of Reddi Industries, a Wichita, Kansas-based plumbing company, toilet paper didn’t become popular until the early 20th century. The new sewage systems needed wipers that wouldn’t clog.
Shafner explains that one of the big producers of toilet paper, the Scott Company, which was founded in 1879, was so embarrassed by their own product, because of what it was used for, that they did not want to be associated with it. They would sell it to places like the Waldorf hotel chain, who then could give it to their guests as their own paper. The product was not for common people, as paper was considered too valuable to use for something largely considered waste. And we all produce a lot of this stuff.
According to Livescience.com, a person poops around 320 pounds a year. That’s 1.7 times the weight of an average American male. Not all the poop goes to waste. There are places in the United States where excrement is still used for fertilization. In some cases, sludge from sewers is sold directly to farmers. In other cases, excrement and water are separated in huge wastewater treatment plants, where artificial fertilizer is produced. But that is an energy-consuming and water-wasting way of producing fertilizer, when some say that the poop just could be composted.
“Basically, we’re taking one resource and polluting another with it and treating both of them as a waste that needs to be purified,” says Shafner. “If we don’t put the poop in the water to begin with, there are simple biological processes like composting, by which that poop is rendered safe and a useful byproduct. And then, the water doesn’t have to be treated.”
Both Shafner and Gerling have been thinking a lot about poop lately, as supermarket shelves are stripped of toilet paper. Gerling is a fan of compost toilets, where excrement becomes fertilizer. He himself is using one of these. But he also points out that there are other ways to save and even produce energy with excrement. The British company Loowatt produces toilets where the poop is covered in organic cellophane and saved in the back of the toilet. When the toilet is emptied, the poop is put into bio-digesters that turn it into energy.
For Safner, the COVID-19 crisis could lead to a search for new ways to get rid of our excrement. On the Instagram profile of The POOP Project, he films himself as he uses his new bidet, which is applied to the toilet and sprays water after you finish. It’s the kind of “wiper” you see on modern Japanese toilets.
COVID-19 has caused panic in the way we defecate, and Shafner thinks we should take the time to think about how we flush. “It’s a moment for us to think about other disasters in which our toilet and sanitary infrastructure does go down. And that can be an enormous health crisis,” he explains.
Most Americans have access to toilets that are connected to sewage systems, but disasters such as hurricanes can compromise the sewage and wastewater treatment plants. That can cause excrement to leak, which can then lead to outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, and diarrhea. While Shafner acknowledges that COVID-19 not has caused this sort of crisis, he argues that we should use this time to learn about new ways to flush, and take advantage of missing toilet paper to explore better ways to wipe.
