Episode: 3048
Title: HPR3048: Alternatives to toilet paper
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3048/hpr3048.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:45:06

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3048 for Wednesday 8 April 2020.
Today's show is entitled, Alternatives to Toilet Paper
and is part of the series, Health and Health Care. It is hosted by Clarty
and is about 12 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summer is
a non-saturical and non-circastic review of alternatives to toilet paper.
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You're listening to Hacker Public Radio. This is Clat 2.
In this episode, I'm going to talk about a topic I never imagined.
I was going to make a Hacker Public Radio episode about
not for even a minute did I imagine it. But it's about poop.
Yes, poop and other words for that substance is kind of a big deal right now
because apparently in many countries, as I record this, people are very, very concerned
about the availability of toilet paper. And they're actually rushing.
They are descending upon their local supermarkets to buy as many rolls of toilet paper as possible.
And there are shortages because people are doing this.
This is a widely recognized problem right now. And it seems odd.
It seems like a strange problem to have. My only theory on this is that people are so used
to very specific creature comforts that the idea of it being taken away from them
for even a short period of time truly, truly terrifies them.
Which is troubling on a couple of different levels.
I mean it's troubling because I don't want people to feel threatened
about basic creature comforts that they have come to rely upon.
No one wants anyone else to be afraid for their own well-being.
And if toilet paper is part of their sense of security, then that's not something
that I would want them to go without.
On the other hand, it does show a little bit of maybe a lack of confidence
in the way that we can get by in life.
It shows a sort of dependency almost on something that I think could be considered essentially a luxury item.
So I thought it was worth talking a little bit about this subject.
Now because there are lots of different terms and sensitivities involved in this subject,
I'm going to use poop for the term for fecal matter.
And I'm going to use the affected area exactly in that tone
for the exit portion of the human colon, otherwise known as the anus.
As probably many people on the internet have probably pointed out,
I imagine toilet paper is actually a relatively recent invention.
Humans have been pooping on a regular basis
for their entire existence.
So the fact that there is a dedicated material for the cleaning of poop
from the affected area is kind of a new thing.
So I want to give you some alternatives to toilet paper in this episode
that you could, should you go to a grocery store and discover that toilet paper is not available,
you could resort to these alternate methods.
And you know, I might add that as many people in many countries already know,
toilet paper is not the most effective way to clean the affected area.
And there have been inventions lately that specialize in cleaning the affected area
far more effectively than toilet paper.
So frankly, if you can't find toilet paper in your local stores,
you might actually be doing yourself a favor.
Look into the day, B-I-D-E-T.
It is like a miniature shower for the affected area.
It literally washes the affected area or rinses at least with water.
And it's a lot more, as I say, effective than toilet paper.
So look into that. If however, in the busyness of life,
you cannot get a bidet immediately.
That's a rather substantial change to make with short notice.
Then there are indeed fallback methods to toilet paper.
Here are a couple.
First one is cloth rags.
Just spare fabric that you have for dedicated to this purpose.
I think that an effective way to do this would be to store the cloths,
the fabric portions in some kind of box or container near your toilet.
And optionally, you could even have, I think, advisedly,
you could have something, some water nearby so that you could wet the cloth.
You could even use soap nearby so that you could soap the cloth a little bit lightly.
And then you could clean the affected area
and then transfer the cloth, now soiled, to a secondary container.
It could be any container. It can be just a plastic bin that you have lying around.
That's otherwise not being used. It can be anything as long as it has a tight lid on it.
You transfer the cloth to that bin for temporary storage until you can.
And you could even put some soapy water into the bin so that it's resting in,
in something that remains wet and clean.
And then when you do laundry or you can do a dedicated load of laundry for these cloths.
It is not dissimilar to the way that diapers were treated back before the human race decided to be ridiculous
and invent disposable diapers or nappies that go into landfills.
This is an extremely effective alternative to toilet paper.
You can use this method and you will hardly know the difference.
The only thing that it really requires is that you set up a system.
The one container for clean cloths and then a container for the used cloths.
And like I say, maybe something in between those two to dampen the cloth, maybe soap it up a little bit if you choose.
It's basically indistinguishable though from that process.
If for whatever reason you cannot obtain cloth, like you don't have any spare cloth available whatsoever, you can use, believe it or not, a sponge.
Now this isn't as as quite as nice as the cloth because the sponge implies that it's going to be reused.
And I don't think that you would want to use this if you did not live alone.
For instance, the cloth method would work a lot better for families and for groups more than one.
Whereas a sponge method really does work fine for a single person.
You just have to make sure that you clean that sponge after each use, which isn't always necessarily the most pleasant thing.
You could, however, sort of get around the immediacy of it by, again, storing it in a secondary container filled with soapy water.
And then before you poop the next time you take the sponge out and you clean it and get it nice and clean ready for the next use.
Now in a real, in a really dire situation, believe it or not, you can even do without either cloth or sponge and use, believe it or not, your hand.
Now this is a little bit tricky because you do have fingernails, you don't want poop under the fingernails, you want to make sure that you're cleaning the affected area with great care.
And certainly you don't want to just use your hand without anything in your hand, for instance, soap and water.
And after cleaning the affected area, you do want to make sure that you clean your hand very, very well, like really well.
Because you use your hands for a lot of other things, like preparing food and just general touching everything else.
So you want to make really, really double sure that you clean your hand really, really well.
I'm just saying that if there's nothing else around that actually that will work for you, it is something that you can do.
And these are only three ideas. There are lots of other ideas out there. You'd be shocked at how many other materials out there would stand in pretty well for toilet paper.
For instance, if you have a lot of old newspapers, you can crumple them up and kind of wear them down, put them in your pocket or something and sit on them for a while, let them kind of get worn down and soft like paper generally does when it's being handled a lot.
So if you prepped stuff in advance, if you know that you're on your last couple of rolls of toilet paper, then you can get stuff ready.
And it will serve as toilet paper for you. It'll do really well. And from what I've understood before people did start using toilet paper, there were lots of portions of the old west that would just use newspaper, old newspaper, something that they didn't need anymore.
It would become toilet paper. There is a leaf out in the forests of New Zealand that is famously pretty well used for toilet paper. Now you don't want to just use any old leaf. You'd want to test this, you know, the leaf to make sure that it doesn't agitate your skin or anything. So maybe rub the leaf on your hand a couple of days in advance to make sure that you don't have any kind of negative reaction to it.
But absolutely you can repurpose just plant life sometimes for toilet paper and there are probably even more ideas that I'm not thinking of.
The point really is that the rush on the supplies of toilet paper in mass is a little bit of an overreaction and that there are lots and lots of alternatives out there.
Don't be afraid to be inventive to come up with new and exciting ways to clean the affected area of unwanted poop. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.
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