The first few months after Covid-19 hit the whole world, people started rushing to get toilet paper until there was a shortage of it at some point.
As much as it’s hard to find a connection between the two, the fact remained you couldn’t get toilet paper.
If you’re someone that had to go through something like that, then you probably considered making your toilet paper at some point, no?
Well, you’ll be glad to hear that you can manufacture your toilet paper, and this article is going to show you how.
Toilet Paper Manufacturing Process
It’s possible to manufacture toilet paper right there in the comfort of your home.
In this section, you’re going to learn how to make your toilet paper at home, similar to how it’s done commercially but now just done manually with a scaled-down overall procedure.
This is a method that’s generally used to make regular paper. Broadly speaking, the smoothness of your paper will largely depend on how fine your mulch.
What Will You Need?
Many of the things required to make toilet paper you probably already have to lie around your house are readily available.
- Plastic sandwich boxes for storing your newspapers as it soaks
- Lots of copy paper or old newspaper. You can also use cardboard to make pulp if you’d like
- Water
- Electric blender
- Clean window screen sheets (non-rusty metal)
- A pair of 12×12-inch square bed sheet material
- A dry sponge
- An old towel
Method
To make your toilet paper at home, you’ll need to use recycled paper.
We don’t mean you reuse old toilet paper, use other waste paper, or used copy paper. The paper’s color will determine what the result will look like.
- Shred the paper into tiny pieces that are somewhat of the same size.
- Soak that paper for around twelve to twenty-four hours.
- Use your blender to turn your soaked paper into mulch. Fill the blender halfway with water to start. Once all the paper has been thoroughly blended, it’ll look sort of like oatmeal. Yes, this blending step can be skipped altogether. However, this will end up giving you a coarse result.
- Add a little cornstarch (this is an optional step but recommended).
- Place your strainer in a warm place.
- Allow all the mulch to dry up and turn into recycled paper.
- After your paper has lost all of the water, get your thin fabric sheet and then lay it over the recycled paper. Use a dry sponge and then press the sheet material hard to make the paper thinner.
- Turn the sheet over out of the strainer.
- Put the paper on a clean sheet and let it finish drying. Lay your sheet on a flat surface (a table should do just fine).
- Your drying sheet shouldn’t be left close to a heat source because this might cause it to crinkle and dry unevenly.
- Once the recycled paper has dried, peel it from the sheet.
- Cut the big sheet into tiny squares and then use those squares as toilet paper.
Optional Extras
- If you want colored toilet paper as a result, add around three to four droplets of food coloring during the blending stage.
- If you want to assist the drying process, place your paper in between two sheets, place it on a flat surface like a table, and iron the sheets.
- If you’re making toilet paper using many old newspapers and your mulch ends up getting discolored, you can use bleach to help whiten the mix
Alternative Toilet Paper Manufacturing Techniques
When you’re manufacturing paper, you’ll need a fiber base. At various stages, there are a wide array of materials that you can use to extract this fiber.
Some of these include:
- Bamboo
- Rice
- Wood
- Water Plants
- Cotton (even from old clothes)
Try experimenting using the method we highlighted above only now. Instead of old newspapers, use the different fiber sources we’ve listed down.
Try making your pulp by chopping wood or shredding some of the materials from the alternatives list above. Try to as creative and imaginative as you can when creating your recipes.
Toilet Paper Alternatives
Do you even need to make or buy toilet paper?
In this part, we’ll look at what you can use instead of tissue paper to wipe down your tail.
Old Newspaper
For several years, before commercially made toilet paper was introduced to the world, people used to wipe themselves with tiny pieces of old newspaper.
Most people would go as far as cutting this newspaper into tiny square pieces, punch a hole in them, pass a string/cord through that hole, and then, finally, hang the papers next to the toilet.
This worked well for so many years.
Wash Cloth
Some cultures don’t like toilet paper. They think it’s gross and all it does is smear the whole butt-cleaning process.
They prefer using wash clothes that they soap up and then wet to wash their posterior thoroughly after using the loo.
Afterward, they clean the used washcloth and then leave it out to dry so that they can use it again next time.
When you think closely about this, you realize maybe these cultures were on to something. It’s a method that’s way more hygienic.
Kitchen Towels
Many dermatologists will tell you that using a wet washcloth to clean yourself up after using the loo is way better on your skin than using dry tissue paper.
On the other hand, wet wipes or per-moistened wipes have been linked to causing certain kinds of medical complications.
Instead of using wet wipes or dry tissue paper, you might just be better off wetting a kitchen towel and then using that to clean your tail. Toilet paper crumbles when dipped in water, so you can’t use this technique with that.
The only issue with this is that they might end blocking your drains once they accumulate inside the pipes. You can solve this problem by using a plastic waste bag to collect the used towels once you’re done.
By-Products/Waste
The bark extracted from the tree trunks is the first waste product when it comes to commercial papermaking.
It’s used to power the paper mills because it burns easily. However, other issues are linked to this industry that are way harder to solve.
Toilet paper manufacturing spawns two controversies; bleaching paper using chlorine dioxide and destroying trees.
While toilet paper manufacturing doesn’t necessarily have to destroy trees, they’re a resource that’s readily available, and toilet paper manufacturers have huge forests they maintain so that their supply line can be fed regularly.
Despite all this, some activists out there want people to use recycled products to manufacture toilet paper and are constantly asking consumers to stop using tissue paper that has been manufactured using new materials.
These activists don’t want new toilet paper processing and manufacturing because it often employs chlorine bleaching. This produces dioxins (a chemical component known to be hazardous to the environment) as a waste by-product.
Pulp and paper mills are the main producers of dioxins. Manufacturers need to assess all their operations carefully and find ways to counteract these dioxin emissions.
Virgin tissue paper makers have increasingly started using alternative bleaching techniques more and more. They’re now using sodium hydroxide, peroxide, and oxygen instead of chlorine.
Some have simply opted to use less chlorine in the bleaching process. Others are cooking their wood chips longer, reducing the amount of lignin in the initial stages, which, in turn, means they’ll not have to use as much bleach.
You’ll also be able to remove a lot more lignin if you wash pulp better, which will help ensure you don’t need as much bleach for whitening.
Wrapping Up
There aren’t many people out there who can live comfortably without toilet paper.
The average US citizen uses more than 100 hundred single toilet paper rolls every year.
Not only is tissue paper used to clean the tail after using the loo, but it’s also used to remove makeup, wipe up spills, small bathroom cleaning chores, and so on.
As you’ve seen, many things can be used to make toilet paper, but the most common material of them all is paper itself. Tissue paper can either have two sheets attached or just a single sheet, meaning one or two-ply.
You can also have different colored toilet paper if you want as well.
The actual procedure of making tissue paper isn’t as hard as most people tend to think. In fact, not only is it quite straightforward, but it can be a great hobby as well.
If you can be a bit more inventive, you can easily scale up your home toilet paper production. All you’d need is a bigger drying frame. Why not be self-sufficient when it comes to toilet paper.
Hopefully, this article is all you’ll need to help you get started.
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