Going to the toilet is universal but how often do we take the time to reflect on the environmental impact of our bathroom habits?
Talking about your toilet exploits would not get you many invites to dinner parties, but what we do in there has significant effects on the environment and our health. It has also changed drastically throughout history. Until the last century, going to the toilet was not the cosy comfort that most of Europe knows today. Researchers believe that fragments of ceramic known as 'pessoi' were used to clean oneself in Roman times. As experts so delicately put it in a British Medical Journal article: “The abrasive characteristics of ceramic suggest that long term use of pessoi could have resulted in local irritation, skin or mucosal damage, or complications of external haemorrhoids.” If you didn’t fancy that, another option was to use a sponge on a stick. It sounds more agreeable until you learn that the sponge was often communal. When was the bathroom invented? The existence of the modern private bathroom with a flushing toilet and other luxuries is very recent, becoming widespread in the last century. The way we clean ourselves has also evolved. Go to any bathroom across the continent and you’ll find a stack of toilet rolls ready for action, but the first packaged toilet paper was only invented in 1857 and it didn’t become common in roll form until 1907.
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