5 Seemingly Innocent Ways You've Screwed The World Today
#2. Your Toilet Paper Murders Rain Forests (For No Reason)
We think (and also hope) it's safe to say that pretty much everyone reading this wipes their asses on a regular basis. Hell, even Zooey Deschanel probably gets the occasional attack of taco poops. It's just life -- shit happens, and toilet paper is what happens next.
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Above: The 2012 spokeswoman for Taco Cabana and Charmin Ultra.
The Horrible Downside:
Do you use nonrecycled toilet paper? Maybe a brand made from virgin wood? Well, that makes you almost as bad for the environment as every Hummer-driving frat boy spending his trust fund money on extra-leaded gasoline.
No, sorry, we're telling a lie. Your taste in toilet paper actually means you have a much bigger impact on global warming than Captain Hummerjock.
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"I need the extra space for all the dead baby seals I have to haul."
Delicate American bottoms prefer plush, bleached white, multi-ply paper with all the toppings. We also use three times as much paper per person as, say, Europeans. In fact, the 36 billion rolls our nation goes through every year is 27 percent of the world's total TP wood harvest.
The thing is, only 2 percent of the toilet paper used in the U.S. is made from recycled wood. For the rest, Big Buttwipe does use manageable, Earth-friendly tree farms whenever they can. However, these can only meet about 25 to 50 percent of the quota set by our needy, needy butts. The rest comes from irreplaceable North American virgin forests. You know, the same forests we rely on to trap greenhouse gases and act as heat sinks, so we can keep the pace of global warming down to a light sprint.
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"Well, this is breathtaking and priceless. Let's turn it into ass wipes."
Sure, there are options. We could just use water to clean ourselves, like 75 percent of the world's population. Sadly, this is such an alien idea to us that even usually media-invincible Will Smith got sideways glances when he bought a paper-free bidet toilet. Increasing the volume of toilet paper made from recycled cellulose doesn't work, either. They've tried. We just won't buy it, even though we'd save 425,000 trees per year if every household in the country would replace a single roll of triple-layered Charmin with a recycled alternative.
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But it's brown and scratchy and we, as a nation, are huge wussies.
#1. We Waste Fuel on Things Nobody Cares About
We are slowly but steadily running out of fossil fuels, and the various alternative energy sources are still facing a crapload of issues. And then there's the whole carbon footprint issue.
Most of us know the usual ways to save gas: get a smaller car, ride a bike, take the bus. We also often have pretty damned good reasons for not doing those things (we need a car that can hold three kids, we live 20 miles from work, the bus is full of smelly hobos).
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On the other hand, that SUV won't fondle your package.
And maybe we do common sense things to save electricity around the house -- for example, we don't leave lights on in rooms we're not in. Hell, maybe we even start unplugging devices that drain that vampire electricity we mentioned earlier. That's about all you can do without trying to read in the dark or sweating out every summer without air conditioning, right?
The Horrible Downsides:
What we tend to forget are the little things. Do you always remember to put your gas cap back on after you refuel? A lot of people don't, and gasoline evaporates. That trivial brain fart amounts to 147 million gallons of wasted fuel per year. And that's small potatoes compared to the 1.2 billion annually wasted gallons caused by driving around on underinflated tires. A further addition to the Pissing Away Fuel score are the 838 million gallons wasted by commercial trucks left to idle overnight to keep them warm.
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In their defense, few things are less appetizing than cold meth.
But what about our houses? Say we use air conditioning sparingly and have decent insulation. Short of installing our own solar panels, it doesn't get much greener than that. Yet despite our best efforts, our homes still leak energy like a beached oil tanker.
For instance, not many people know that insulation degrades over time. As your house gets older, your insulation gets leakier, up to the point where all the minuscule fractures amount to the same effect as having a hole the size of a basketball in your living room wall.
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After replacing your insulation, the old stuff is a decent cotton candy substitute.
But the main reason our houses are energy sieves is one you'd never guess in a million years: roof color.
Most houses have dark roofs, because they're often proofed with black tar and we have grown to think dark colors are the way to go. However, you know from elementary school that black absorbs light and heat -- it's why people wear light colors in the summer. A black roof absorbs heat, which your air conditioner has to fight to keep up with.
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Bards will sing of their glorious battle for generations.
The problem could be fixed by painting our roofs white, a color that can reflect 85 percent of sunlight. But until we get around to that, we're stuck with a completely pointless annual waste of 14 power plants' worth of energy, not to mention absolutely insane greenhouse gas emissions.
Why don't we paint all of the roofs white, then? Because they're ugly. But the time is coming when we might just have to get over that.
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The homeowner's associations of the world aren't going down without a fight.
Robert Evans has a blog and writes many captions for Cracked.com. If you'd like him to write for you, just send a private message.
For more big time game changers, check out 6 Tiny Things That Have Mind-Blowing Global Impacts and 5 World Changing Decisions (Made for Ridiculous Reasons).
And stop by LinkSTORM to see what ecosystems Brockway's toilet paper destroys.
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Thanks Cracked! I was having a crappy day until you reminded me that we're all slowly (much too slowly IMO) killing ourselves. That's just what I needed. (Now if I just had a big ole pile of coke while i'm in the middle of a misanthropic hate-rage trip)
ReplyIn my defense, regarding #2, I'm allergic to many brands of toilet paper. Cottonelle and Charmin are the only two I can use without problem, and since Charmin is P&G and P&G still utilizes animal testing in their labs, Cottonelle it is! I don't know if it's recycled...it probably isn't...but the environment needs to take that one for the team! Those particular areas are a HORRIBLE place to break out in hives and cracked, bleeding skin.
ReplyFrom a purely superficial perspective, a white roof would show off more stains- bird poop and squirrel poop would stain it unevenly. Rainwater could alter the shade. Chlorophyll from nearby trees might discolor it.
ReplySheryl Crow only uses 1 square of toilet paper. I think that's disgusting! I'll conserve paper in other ways. Don't take away my toilet paper!
It is not possible to WASTE WATER ! Matter can not be created or destroyed. Water is merely returned to the natural cycle of evaporation, condensation and precipitation. ...... There's plenty of water - just in the wrong place (floods, tsunamis, droughts etc).
ReplyMatter -can- be 'destroyed', in the sense that it can be converted into energy, which is, by definition, not matter. More importantly, there are exactly zero rules saying that the matter that makes up water has to stay water, and not, say, turn into one of the many types of acid it actually turns into quite easily (sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid, for example).
On #2 and #3, wouldn't switching to paper-free bidets make the water problem worse?
Replydammit, stop scaring me cracked!
ReplyThis is a lot of the stuff I b***h about. I hope a PART TWO to this list is made.
ReplyWait, wiping my ass with tp is bad, so I should use water? But there's going to be a water shortage too? I'm switching to bunnies.
ReplyHey... You wanna go and wipe your ass with sandpaper, go for it... But don't come crying to us when you get splinters from your nasty recycled wood TP...
ReplyIsn't all paper made out of wood?
I feel so righteous (I know I shouldn't) because few of the things on this list seem to apply to me.
Reply Hide All See All 4 Replies-The place I live in utilizes nuclear power, which means that I can use all the electricity I want without polluting anything
-I'm male, and not sexually active and trying to avoid (a partner's) pregnancy
-Because of where I live (central NC), the climate and soil type makes watering a lawn unnecessary nine months of the year.
-I have to admit that I am a guilty hell-bound user of toilet paper.
-I don't have a driver's license, and my main modes of transportation include walking, biking, and getting rides.
-Due to the friendly climate I live in, heating and AC isn't needed half the time
-My family has the money to afford relatively fuel-efficient cars
My question here is, does this make me better than anyone else? (I hope so)
No. It just makes you more of a douchebag.
Ignore Vlad. It doesn't make you more of a douchebag. It also doesn't make you better, particularly since you did not choose these things (at least, not for the purpose of avoiding waste).
You are just lucky.
Also nuclear power isn't inherently better for the environment, there are a lot of pros AND cons for it.
Random_Nerd: Oh, no, it definitely is inherently better for the environment than most of the alternatives (see: coal). It's just a matter of 'better' being a relative term.
Electricity was used to write this story, to maintain the site domain, everyone's ISP, and everyone's computer.
ReplySuck it hippy.
Why does degrading insulation mean greater energy loss?
ReplyThe heater increases how much power it's using to make up the lost heat.
If your house is colder, the heater has to be hotter.
If the insulation isn't keeping the heat in the house, it's leaving, and the heater has to work harder to pump out more heat.
We never water our lawn, we let the rain do that shit.
ReplySame with my family...
Right on. I'm allergic to 90% of the stuff in my lawn, so I keep hoping that we'll get a drought that'll kill the stuff off... The only water it gets is rain and dog pee.
Funny how this article brings up five band-aid issues but never addresses the most important way humans mess up the planet - by refusing to do anything to slow down overpopulation. Until we get the planet down to a reasonable occupancy, it doesn't matter what we do.
Replygrab your shotgun, we gon' go out and shoo the underprivileged
One of them does show the downside of one of the more (first-world) common means of attempting not to personally contribute to overpopulation....
And also we would blind and the pilots of planes going overhead, f*ck with birds (or change their migratory patterns because the dumb sh*ts would think it's winter or something), as well as a mess of other reasons everybody having a white roof would be stupid.
ReplyWait, what? Are you under the impression that pilots spend all their time staring down at the ground? And how much of our world do you think is covered by rooftops, anyway? Painting roofs white is an excellent idea if you want to conserve heating/cooling energy. And since you think birds are "dumb shits", why would you care what happens to them?
white roofs are not f*****g mirrors, d*****t, nor do birds think white = snow. they seem to know to get the f**k out of my home town in the winter, and it never snows there.
Some of us live in places where dark roofs HELP environmentally half of the year, since it gets.. you know... COLD here, and a light colored roof would keep passive solar energy from helping us.....
Replyand i bet your football team wins half the time, making them the best?
You are right, there are climates where a dark roof may be preferable to a white one. That doesn't change the fact that there are lots and lots of cities and settlements that would benefit from white roofs.
I hand-wash my ass, I walk 2 miles to and from work, and I don't drink that Morning After shit. I'd better get an Al Gore Award for this.
ReplyBut in Texas in summer, if it's especially hot, they tell us to save our water and let our grass die. So far this year (knock on wood), we've gotten lots of rain, so the grass is coming back.
ReplyOther than that, this article crushes my soul, especially since I need birth control for health reasons. Poor fish.
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ReplyCould someone delete this PORN SPAM, please?
First, crappy toilet paper leaves nasty ass pieces on my lady parts and actually really irritates it all. If you find me stuff that doesn't disintigrate, I will use it, even if it's "scratchy". Second, with the dark roof part, what about people that live in a climate where you need the heat 7 months out of the year, if not more? I live in New England, so I'd think the dark roofs would actually be the smart option here and it would save heat.
Replyall the roof detractors seem to be missing the point that the article might not actually be talking to you. i know, hard to believe!