[pct-l] TP - Perspective

[Paul Mitchell]

"I think it's awesome how much people on this list are concerned with their
environmental impact."

That's a great comment, thanks Dan!  It's easy to lose sight with online
debates just how trivial the differences of our arguments are compared to
our shared concerns and perspectives.

To offer a bit of perspective, consider this:

In the city we purify massive amounts of fresh water, contaminate it with
our waste, and hopefully it gets treated before it re-enters the waterways.
Not the case in Victoria where I live, we pump our waste completely
untreated out to sea.  This is a worst case scenario, concentrating the
waste of hundreds of thousands or millions of people into small areas.  If
Ron has a background in Waste Management then he'd have some perspective on
the environmental costs of sewage treatment.

Then there we hikers our out in the wild, digging an average of one hole
each per day, making our deposit.  Maybe the worst case scenario (other than
starting a forest fire with burning TP) is that due to the climate it takes
a few years to fully decompose - our waste there is nevertheless eventually
becoming fertilizer, including the toilet paper.  This is such a HUGE
improvement from what's happening at home, I don't think we should feel in
the slightest bit guilty about our poop holes.

Here's another consideration about TP - pack it out in a plastic bag and
where does it end up?  Most likely in that plastic bag in a landfill, where
it most definitely will not decompose and contribute to soil. The only way
that packing out your toilet paper, IMHO, could be better than burying it is
if you when you arrive in town you take it out of the plastic bag and add it
to a proper human waste compost.  No offense to advocates of packing TP out,
I'm 100% sure you have the best of intentions.

Obviously not using TP in the first place is the best option from an
environmental perspective.  To assess the full impact of TP usage we'd need
to consider the cost of gathering the resources (deforestation), the
production process (chemicals, carbon output, etc), distribution (carbon
emissions), packaging (plastics), etc.  When we look at the full life cycle
of any consumer product, it has a much higher cost than we initially
realize.

Just a few things to think about.  Ultimately I think if it's used it's
better in the soil than in a plastic bag in a landfill.

P178