Does one dare to use one square?
How long should a shit sheet be?
These are the questions that end relationships and confound the world at large. Everyone seems to have a different style of wiping, and we all seem to use varying amounts of paper to do the job. Some people bunch the paper in to a big wad while others fold it neatly into layers. No one wants to get poo on their hand, but no one wants to destroy the environment -- or, worse, clog up the toilet.
Kimberly-Clark claims to have come up with a solution: training people at an early age to use TP sparingly. Cottonelle for Kids is dookie paper that shows you when to stop unrolling it [1]. As explained in a thinly-veiled press release masquerading as news, "It consists of premium toilet paper with paw prints leading to a puppy on every fifth sheet to cue the kid where to tear off -- plus a tub of flushable moist wipes."
Aside from the potential for kids to start using puppies to wipe themselves, I see another problem here. I suspect that Kimberly-Clark intends to train a new generation to rely on their moist wipes into adulthood. Perhaps that is why they have chosen the conservative number of five as the amount of sheets a child should use. Although I personally use only four or five squares per wipe, I know that most people use more. In addition to the recent poll [2], PoopReport actually did a fairly scientific Toilet Paper Square Usage Survey [3] a few years back. Dave, the statistician behind the survey, is quoted as saying, "We found that people use an average of 44 squares per flush (although, alas, we don't have data on the number of squares per wipe)."
If we take the five squares recommended by Kimberly-Clark and plug it in to Dave's findings, we come up with nine wipes to clean the average assterisk. Thus the five wipe limit strikes me as a ploy to push the moist wipes. No kid is going to diligently adhere to their allotted five squares over and over again when they can do it with a couple of wipes. Eventually the wipes -- which are more expensive, of course -- will take the place of toilet paper.
If that seems terribly wasteful, we may want to pursue the idea proposed by Paraschiv Usturoiu, head of the Department of Culture in Vrancea County, Bucharest, Romania. He's decided that all his workers will do fine using newspapers and magazines to wipe [4]. "I can't afford to buy toilet paper any more," he said, "so I cut some local newspapers into pieces and placed them in the toilets. I'm sure they'll work just fine."
His employees are not so enthusiastic, and are registering complaints about the new policy. Perhaps they should have been started with newspaper at an earlier age.