Posts Tagged ‘toilet habits’

How to clean a toilet without chemicals

Posted in Uncategorized on June 4th, 2009 by admin – Be the first to comment

This is good – I saw it some time back and have often thought about it. It uses prevention and thinking rather than, well, the opposite.
The premise is that squirting chemicals into the environment will-nilly isn’t good. The second point is that it often isn’t necessary. If it is not necessary then coating (and staining?) the bowl in blue (the colour of clean?) coloured drips is a small and mindless act of pollution (ask the folks who manage the sewage plants, or a fish). 
As the author points out, if you scrub with the brush once a week, your toilet will remain nice and clean. That’s it. 
It is also interesting to contemplate the marketing of toilet cleaners which are all about making us afraid of germs and smells. Firstly the smells: open the window and wait. Secondly those germs. “Kills 99% of all known germs, even under the rim!”. Picture the team of researchers swabbing peoples fingers in trains running up and down the length of the UK. Guess what they found! Around 50% of those swabbed had faecal matter on their fingers! The last place we need to be worried about germs is under the toilet’s rim, it’s a hoax! Worry about the light switch!
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http://www.hedgeapple.nl/downloads/How-to-clean-a-toilet-without-chemicals.pdf


How clean is your anus right now?

Posted in Uncategorized on March 21st, 2009 by admin – 4 Comments

OK, it is not a question I would like to ask you, and probably not one you’d like to be asked either. For the majority of us, I guess, since our parents stopped helping us sit on the toilet, what we do behind the locked door has been shared with no-one else, and our techniques are very personal. It has long become something we don’t think about but just do.

The first time you travel to an Asian country, perhaps with the exception of Thailand (excuse the website, but the article is to the point), you’ll see that there are other ways to do these basic things.

Using toilet paper to clean yourself down there makes about as much hygienic sense as cleaning yourself with a towel and imagining you’re rubbing off the dirt. We’ve got a very unhygienic way of cleaning a place of our body that we would like to be very clean.

Worth reading this interview with Rose George: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2008/10/16/big_necessity/

So that has got the cleanliness thing out of the way. Then there is the ridiculous amount of toilet paper use:

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.
See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/26/toilet-roll-america

I don’t have any data on the size of the average American butt.

None of this really applies to me. Since being in Nepal I am, more or less, a washer again. Fresh as a daisy, that’s me.

What do other people think about this? As mentioned in the first line, I am not going to ask you. But there is a small window on this very personal world in the comments below this article. A lot of people just don’t want to get what the article is saying. Where does this abhorrence of shit and shitting come from?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/04/stop-using-toilet-paper

One thing I am curious about: how much toilet paper do women use compared to men? Is there any data on this?

Update: for those curious about washing, see: http://www.bathroomsprayers.com/ – thanks to David for his self-promoting comment below.