Toilet Paper Usage Analysis

Often, while I’m doing things around the apartment, I’ll leave the TV on to be used as a procrastination tool. On one such occasion, I think the History channel was showing how paper is made (more interesting than it sounds) and I caught an interesting fact as it went to commercial. It said that on average, American’s use over 20,000 sheets of toilet paper per year.

First of all, I generally use Scott 1000 because they are easily found at all of the supermarkets, bodegas, delis, and newspaper stands that I may frequent, and consistency is more important to my butt than just softness. Considering that each roll has 1000 sheets, that works out to about 20 rolls per year. That means that on average, a roll should last about 18 days. For a roll to last 18 days, I could use up to a maximum of 55 sheets per day, which sounded quite reasonable to me. Maybe I am an average user, but as I sat there crunching the numbers, 20 rolls per year just sounded a little too light to me.

It was these sort of numbers that made me question how much toilet paper I actually use, and it was this curiosity that led me to start keeping track of how much I actually do use. I went into this WOMBAT project with the notion that I wasn’t going to keep track of actual sheet-by-sheet data because that would be way too much work. Instead, in keeping with my “be as lazy as possible” attitude, I will just keep track of when I start a new roll and when it ends. This will give me a nice average on how long a roll lasts, and will give me the total number of sheets used per year.

Of course, there are going to be problems with this count. The most obvious is that I use toilet paper in places other than my apartment. In an emergency, I will “drop a deuce” at work, although I prefer not to, and I don’t spend every night in my apartment due to vacations, business trips, “away games”, etc. In addition, I may not be the only person that uses toilet paper in my apartment. I’m not going to try and be as accurate as possible, but I may make a note of extenuating circumstances related to a roll. In addition, I use toilet paper for things other than it’s intended purpose…in case I run out of tissues, I use toilet paper on my nose…I use it to clean my glasses…I use it to clean up the sink after shaving…as napkins when I don’t feel like walking the extra 20 feet to the kitchen…etc.

This project officially started on April 11th, 2007, with toilet paper roll #1. It should last through April 11th, 2008 or until the roll in use on that day is used up.

(Sheryl Crow’s idea that a person can get away with using only one square per trip is ridiculous!)

September 13, 2007

It’s been five months, and I’ve hit the 20th roll — way ahead of the average.

Analysis over

April 14, 2008 — The analysis is over. It’s been one year and four days, and in that time, I’ve used 49 rolls of toilet paper bathroom tissue, or 49,000 sheets, at an approximate cost of $52.43. You can see the details below, but it’s clear that I use a lot more than the national average.

There were six rolls that lasted 10 days or longer, and I tried to analyze why those rolls lasted well over the average, but I couldn’t really pin it down. There was a five-day trip taken during the 15-day roll in July/Aug., but that still means that that roll lasted 10 days while I was around.

One thing that I noticed is that while at other venues that employed a more luxurious bathroom tissue, I used much less than I normally would if I were in my apartment. Not even half as much. So, it is quite likely, if I were to switch to a different bathroom tissue, that I would be able to hit the 20,000 sheets per year average. This is not an analysis that I’m planning to make.

I’m not sure that any true meaning can be taken from this WOMBAT, but it was interesting to quantify my personal usage.

Summary

• There were 49 rolls between Apr 11, 2007 and Apr 14, 2008.
• The average length of time a roll lasted was 7.4 days, which was an average of 135.4 sheets per day, at an average cost of $0.14 per day (based on an average cost of $1.07 per roll).
• The longest amount of time a roll lasted was 15 days by roll number 15 between Jul 28, 2007 and Aug 12, 2007.
• The shortest amount of time a roll lasted was 3 days by roll number 17 between Aug 20, 2007 and Aug 23, 2007.
• Since each roll is about 302 feet long and 115.2 square feet, I used a total of about 2.80 miles or 5,644.80 square feet of toilet paper.

Individual sample data