6 ms·

How toilet paper is made (2014) [video]

113 points by jonbaer 7y ago

remcob 7y ago
I remember that saw blade (4:48) from when I first saw it years ago and I'll never forget it. There's something terrifying about it. Probably the rapid organic movement and complete lack of cover.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
henearkr 7y ago
Toilet paper is relatively new in human's history. I'd love to see the current crisis as an incentive to go back to some alternative... All this cellulose could then be allocated to other uses.
bouvin 7y ago
For more context, The History Guy recently did the history on toilet paper: https://youtu.be/IVTRpTHPs3o https://youtu.be/IVTRpTHPs3o as did Today I Found Out: https://youtu.be/1Xiu-L0BYak https://youtu.be/1Xiu-L0BYak
vinhboy 7y ago
I am surprised to learn most toilet paper come from recycled paper. The whole bleaching it white seems rather unnecessary. Do consumers really demand their TP be white?
- lstamour 7y ago
  Some TP does come from recycling (Cascades, shown here, appears to also have a recycling division) but some doesn’t — https://www.nrdc.org/media/2019/190220 https://www.nrdc.org/media/2019/190220 for example.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  People associate white with cleanliness and the reason is straightforward. Any dirt on a white object is immediately obvious.
- douchescript 7y ago
  Since toilet paper goes out into nature it is better to not use recycled, less heavy metals and contaminants in fresh paper. Contraintuitive but true.
  - unwind 7y ago
    Not sure where you live, but in areas with public sewage of course the treatment plants remove as much as possible from the water before it reaches nature.
    - pengaru 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure TP disintegrates in the sewage system, there's no hope nor need of separating it from feces.
      - jacobush 7y ago
        So? Flocking etc aims to remove everything but the water itself. Still, heavy metals is not something you want in the sludge either.
      - unwind 7y ago
        That makes it sound as if the feces are just flushed out into nature, which is very far from my understanding. Of course the purpose of a sewage treatment plant is to remove as much as possible of the material in the water, regardless of what it is, ending up with water that is as pure as possible so it can be let out into nature.
        pengaru 7y ago
        My understanding is that the solids are separated from the liquids and in the case of the MWRD of Chicago [0], air dried before being put to reuse. The point is TP just becomes part of the solids and there's no need to separate it from the rest of the solids, it's complementary being derived from trees. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Water_Reclamation_District_of_Greater_Chicago#Biosolids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Water_Reclamation...
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Seventh Generation (as one particularly notable example) sells both bleached and unbleached toilet paper.
- premek 7y ago
  yes, white, pastel colors and perfumed
lstamour 7y ago
Somebody mentioned their surprise in seeing the metric system here in a since deleted comment. I wanted to mention it’s not that unusual given the How It’s Made show is produced out of Quebec. https://www.manufacturing.net/home/article/13055620/the-making-of-how-its-made https://www.manufacturing.net/home/article/13055620/the-maki... The show listed all of the filming locations on its website. Via Internet Archive I discovered this was filmed at Cascades paper in Canada (likely a Montreal, QC production location)
- cs02rm0 7y ago
  I saw that too. Interested to see the use of metric system (75 km long roll, 165 cm wide inner tube). I presume that the narrator is just reading a script which is based on the actual units the toilet paper company uses. I used to travel to Europe often and always been the butt of the metric system jokes (I am American) but I think people do not understand is that metric system is used more widely than they think in the US. It is the official system of the USA (Pub. L. 94-168, §2, Metric Conversion Act 1975 § 205b 1.). Furthermore, entire industires such as semiconductor, electronics, pharmaceuticals, medicine and dentistry, sports (100 meter runs) and the U.S. Military uses metric system extensively if not exclusively in many areas. There are still areas in our life where we do not have nice divisibility by decimal numbering system (which is one of the advantages of the metric system of units) - time (0-24 hours), angle (0-360 degrees), font sizes (Swiss points), aviation / navy, Space industry, etc around the world including nations in Europe. IMO if we had to rewind history and start over again, we should have chosen a base-12 duodecimal system instead of decimal. Imagine how the world would be like if we had 12 fingers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal One example that always sticks out to me is hearing about German cars being limited to 155mph when of course it's really 250kph. Often you'll find a metric value being quoted as authoritative that's the conversion of an imperial measure though. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that 165cm wide tube was originally set there because something was 65 inches.
isolli 7y ago
Every automated industrial process is a miracle and a wonder to behold.
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  Hence the popularity of How it's Made. One of the few shows where I can enjoy the episodes more than once.
adityapurwa 7y ago
I always wondered how people used toilet paper to clean themselves as I tried it once before when I travelled to a place where they only have toilet paper and it is a bad user experience and incredibly messy for me. The amount of paper required to totally clean myself (pardon) properly is massive. I live in a a place where we use a bidet to clean ourself, or the water jet thing if it doesn’t have any bidet. Then we put a soap in our left hand and wipe it (pardon) on the area of interest to clean everything as we wash it with water. Then we wash our hands and its clean and refreshing. Additionally, I combined both. First cleaning with water and soap, then wipe it with toilet paper. I personally think this combination is good, its clean, and it does not waste a lot of paper.
- new2628 7y ago
  The reverse combination also works: remove the larger particles with paper, use soap and water to finish the job. It's amazing how most of the western world gets by with paper only. Try holding a piece of ... in the hand, then clean it with paper only. No amount of paper will make it clean enough.
  - numlock86 7y ago
    There is also the option of wet paper towels, which works also very nice.
    - pan69 7y ago
      Apparently those wet paper towels are a real strain on the sewer system, clogging it.
      - gpmcadam 7y ago
        There's a general conflation of two types of wet towels. 1. "Wet Wipes" which are commonly used to clean babies and young children, these must be disposed of in the bin and can't be flushed 2. "Wet Toilet Paper" which is a far less durable version of the above, and flushes and disintegrates as normal. In the UK, these come with a "Flushable" symbol on the package.
drmpeg 7y ago
One of my first engineering jobs in the late 70's was working at a paper dryer manufacturer in southern Maine. The owner's son had a little side company the was building process control systems for the dryers with Multibus based computers and 8080 processors. Since the company was so small, we all had multiple roles including installation. I ended up visiting many different kinds of paper mills such as oil filter paper and roofing paper. But the most insane sites were the toilet paper mills. Just ginormous machines spewing out TP at 5000 feet per minute. Noise so deafening, you had to wear heavy duty ear protection and use hand signals. One time we were installing a system in Medford, Oregon. The plant electrician was inspecting our install and the owner's son is showing off our relay rack to him. He pulls out a random relay (they were in octal sockets) to show the electrician what we were using. Turns out the relay was in series with a live circuit on the dryer, and the line goes down. After they get the line back up, the foreman comes over and tells us how much money that mistake had cost them. I can't remember the figure, but it was pretty embarrassing. Doh!
venti 7y ago
If you speak any German, the children's TV show "Sendung mit der Maus" did a more in-depth movie about making toilet paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwSPihWGOCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwSPihWGOCI
- camillovisini 7y ago
  Flashbacks to my childhood...
arberavdullahu 7y ago
How are toilet paper companies affected as the world is going more and more to a paperless world if the first product is mostly recycled paper?
- dylan604 7y ago
  Sadly, I don't think the world is a paperless as one might hope. I'd imagine the bulk of the first recycled product is cardboard. The amount of paper saved in paperless billing or not printing out emails is easily outweighed by the amount of cardboard packaging increases.
enesunal 7y ago
haven't recycled papers, now cannot find toilet papers.
buffin 7y ago
Not all toilet papers use recycled paper. "Major toilet paper brands have refused to use more sustainable materials, the report says, because Americans tend to more concerned than the rest of the world about ideal toilet paper texture in their homes, largely due to decades of marketing around toilet paper softness." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/canada-boreal-forest-toilet-paper-us-climate-change-impact-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/canada-boreal-...

113 points by jonbaer 7y ago

I remember that saw blade (4:48) from when I first saw it years ago and I'll never forget it. There's something terrifying about it. Probably the rapid organic movement and complete lack of cover.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

henearkr 7y ago

Toilet paper is relatively new in human's history. I'd love to see the current crisis as an incentive to go back to some alternative... All this cellulose could then be allocated to other uses.

bouvin 7y ago

For more context, The History Guy recently did the history on toilet paper: https://youtu.be/IVTRpTHPs3o https://youtu.be/IVTRpTHPs3o as did Today I Found Out: https://youtu.be/1Xiu-L0BYak https://youtu.be/1Xiu-L0BYak

vinhboy 7y ago

I am surprised to learn most toilet paper come from recycled paper. The whole bleaching it white seems rather unnecessary. Do consumers really demand their TP be white?

lstamour 7y ago
Some TP does come from recycling (Cascades, shown here, appears to also have a recycling division) but some doesn’t — https://www.nrdc.org/media/2019/190220 https://www.nrdc.org/media/2019/190220 for example.
im3w1l 7y ago
People associate white with cleanliness and the reason is straightforward. Any dirt on a white object is immediately obvious.
douchescript 7y ago
Since toilet paper goes out into nature it is better to not use recycled, less heavy metals and contaminants in fresh paper. Contraintuitive but true.
- unwind 7y ago
  Not sure where you live, but in areas with public sewage of course the treatment plants remove as much as possible from the water before it reaches nature.
  - pengaru 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure TP disintegrates in the sewage system, there's no hope nor need of separating it from feces.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      So? Flocking etc aims to remove everything but the water itself. Still, heavy metals is not something you want in the sludge either.
    - unwind 7y ago
      That makes it sound as if the feces are just flushed out into nature, which is very far from my understanding. Of course the purpose of a sewage treatment plant is to remove as much as possible of the material in the water, regardless of what it is, ending up with water that is as pure as possible so it can be let out into nature.
      - pengaru 7y ago
        My understanding is that the solids are separated from the liquids and in the case of the MWRD of Chicago [0], air dried before being put to reuse. The point is TP just becomes part of the solids and there's no need to separate it from the rest of the solids, it's complementary being derived from trees. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Water_Reclamation_District_of_Greater_Chicago#Biosolids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Water_Reclamation...
yellowapple 7y ago
Seventh Generation (as one particularly notable example) sells both bleached and unbleached toilet paper.
premek 7y ago
yes, white, pastel colors and perfumed

lstamour 7y ago

Somebody mentioned their surprise in seeing the metric system here in a since deleted comment. I wanted to mention it’s not that unusual given the How It’s Made show is produced out of Quebec. https://www.manufacturing.net/home/article/13055620/the-making-of-how-its-made https://www.manufacturing.net/home/article/13055620/the-maki... The show listed all of the filming locations on its website. Via Internet Archive I discovered this was filmed at Cascades paper in Canada (likely a Montreal, QC production location)

cs02rm0 7y ago
I saw that too. Interested to see the use of metric system (75 km long roll, 165 cm wide inner tube). I presume that the narrator is just reading a script which is based on the actual units the toilet paper company uses. I used to travel to Europe often and always been the butt of the metric system jokes (I am American) but I think people do not understand is that metric system is used more widely than they think in the US. It is the official system of the USA (Pub. L. 94-168, §2, Metric Conversion Act 1975 § 205b 1.). Furthermore, entire industires such as semiconductor, electronics, pharmaceuticals, medicine and dentistry, sports (100 meter runs) and the U.S. Military uses metric system extensively if not exclusively in many areas. There are still areas in our life where we do not have nice divisibility by decimal numbering system (which is one of the advantages of the metric system of units) - time (0-24 hours), angle (0-360 degrees), font sizes (Swiss points), aviation / navy, Space industry, etc around the world including nations in Europe. IMO if we had to rewind history and start over again, we should have chosen a base-12 duodecimal system instead of decimal. Imagine how the world would be like if we had 12 fingers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal One example that always sticks out to me is hearing about German cars being limited to 155mph when of course it's really 250kph. Often you'll find a metric value being quoted as authoritative that's the conversion of an imperial measure though. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that 165cm wide tube was originally set there because something was 65 inches.

isolli 7y ago

Every automated industrial process is a miracle and a wonder to behold.

stronglikedan 7y ago
Hence the popularity of How it's Made. One of the few shows where I can enjoy the episodes more than once.

adityapurwa 7y ago

I always wondered how people used toilet paper to clean themselves as I tried it once before when I travelled to a place where they only have toilet paper and it is a bad user experience and incredibly messy for me. The amount of paper required to totally clean myself (pardon) properly is massive. I live in a a place where we use a bidet to clean ourself, or the water jet thing if it doesn’t have any bidet. Then we put a soap in our left hand and wipe it (pardon) on the area of interest to clean everything as we wash it with water. Then we wash our hands and its clean and refreshing. Additionally, I combined both. First cleaning with water and soap, then wipe it with toilet paper. I personally think this combination is good, its clean, and it does not waste a lot of paper.

new2628 7y ago
The reverse combination also works: remove the larger particles with paper, use soap and water to finish the job. It's amazing how most of the western world gets by with paper only. Try holding a piece of ... in the hand, then clean it with paper only. No amount of paper will make it clean enough.
- numlock86 7y ago
  There is also the option of wet paper towels, which works also very nice.
  - pan69 7y ago
    Apparently those wet paper towels are a real strain on the sewer system, clogging it.
    - gpmcadam 7y ago
      There's a general conflation of two types of wet towels. 1. "Wet Wipes" which are commonly used to clean babies and young children, these must be disposed of in the bin and can't be flushed 2. "Wet Toilet Paper" which is a far less durable version of the above, and flushes and disintegrates as normal. In the UK, these come with a "Flushable" symbol on the package.

drmpeg 7y ago

One of my first engineering jobs in the late 70's was working at a paper dryer manufacturer in southern Maine. The owner's son had a little side company the was building process control systems for the dryers with Multibus based computers and 8080 processors. Since the company was so small, we all had multiple roles including installation. I ended up visiting many different kinds of paper mills such as oil filter paper and roofing paper. But the most insane sites were the toilet paper mills. Just ginormous machines spewing out TP at 5000 feet per minute. Noise so deafening, you had to wear heavy duty ear protection and use hand signals. One time we were installing a system in Medford, Oregon. The plant electrician was inspecting our install and the owner's son is showing off our relay rack to him. He pulls out a random relay (they were in octal sockets) to show the electrician what we were using. Turns out the relay was in series with a live circuit on the dryer, and the line goes down. After they get the line back up, the foreman comes over and tells us how much money that mistake had cost them. I can't remember the figure, but it was pretty embarrassing. Doh!

venti 7y ago

If you speak any German, the children's TV show "Sendung mit der Maus" did a more in-depth movie about making toilet paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwSPihWGOCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwSPihWGOCI

camillovisini 7y ago
Flashbacks to my childhood...

arberavdullahu 7y ago

How are toilet paper companies affected as the world is going more and more to a paperless world if the first product is mostly recycled paper?

dylan604 7y ago
Sadly, I don't think the world is a paperless as one might hope. I'd imagine the bulk of the first recycled product is cardboard. The amount of paper saved in paperless billing or not printing out emails is easily outweighed by the amount of cardboard packaging increases.

enesunal 7y ago

haven't recycled papers, now cannot find toilet papers.

buffin 7y ago

Not all toilet papers use recycled paper. "Major toilet paper brands have refused to use more sustainable materials, the report says, because Americans tend to more concerned than the rest of the world about ideal toilet paper texture in their homes, largely due to decades of marketing around toilet paper softness." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/canada-boreal-forest-toilet-paper-us-climate-change-impact-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/canada-boreal-...