The toilet paper

A friend of ours, a hydraulic-sanitary engineer, went to take part in an event at his grandchildren’s school, an American bilingual school in a Brazilian city. Upon going to the bathroom, he came across an unusual notice, in Portuguese and in English: “do not place used toilet paper in the toilet bowl, place it in the basket.”

Now, toilet paper, made of small cellulose fibers, produced to dissolve in water, especially after being used to clean the bottom, is meant to be disposed of in the toilet bowl, for sanitary reasons:

>to prevent animals and insects such as flies and cockroaches from smearing themselves with traces of feces and walking around other places spreading what should not be spread,

>> to avoid odors; in short, there is no reasonable reason not to throw used paper into the toilet bowl.

Sanitary sewage systems, especially the system normally adopted in Brazil (absolute separate system), ensure the safe transport of waste to the sewage treatment plant and, even if there is no conventional treatment, simple dilution and the time of exposure of pathogenic agents to an environment hostile to them in physical-chemical-biological terms already guarantee a good improvement in the possible transmission of diseases.

If it “clogs”, it is because the installation is badly done. It must be fixed because it will clog with or without toilet paper, which takes the blame for all the barbarities that are thrown into toilet bowls, deliberately or by accident, as the people who maintain sewer networks can tell: sanitary pads, diapers, pieces of clothing, children’s toys, packaging, magazines, in short...

The other day this same friend went to visit a relative who lives in a brand-new, high-standard gated condominium and, upon going to the bathroom, was warned: throw toilet paper in the basket! He asked the relative where he had studied, but there was no relation to bilingual schools.

It happens that this opinion that toilet paper, after being used, should be placed in a basket has been becoming generalized and, our friend, being a sanitary engineering professional, began to get annoyed and at the same time interested in the subject.

He asked the relative: “why”? The answer was similar to that of the American school’s administration: “it clogs, that is what I was told.” Told by whom, pale-face? That was the first question that came to his mind, but he held back.

However, the relative added an explanation: they told me that the flush tank does not have enough “pressure” (sic) to carry the paper, only with the “wall valve”, and there it was with flush tanks, to “save water”.

Our friend asked whether the flush tank had two flushing stages, one for “number 1” (less water) and another for “number 2” (more water), and whether the installation was correct (modern wall valves also have these two stages). The answer was total ignorance of the subject.

Our friend’s scientific curiosity led him to inspect the flush tank and discover that the construction company and the administrator had regulated all the tanks to fill only halfway, probably with the intention of saving water, therefore the flow obtained was only enough for type number 1 use (only urine), but insufficient for, let us say, “full” use (number 2 with some toilet paper).

The municipal concessionaires that supply water and sewage services take advantage of these “discourses” about saving water for the planet (as if water were abducted), to save money, because smaller “volumes” of water consumed generate smaller investments or postpone them, even when there is water in abundance, even knowing that the dilution of sewage in more water is also a treatment.

Real estate construction companies use similar arguments and save money by making tiny bathrooms, without a water column for wall flushing (smaller diameters) and without a bidet (for greater hygiene and less toilet paper), leaving points for small cold-water sprayers, which seem to me very impractical improvisations. The best thing really is a bidet.

These subjects lead the mind to important existential doubts that permeate the theme, some of which deserve reflection:

>does the toilet paper roll unwind next to the wall or along the opposite tangent?

>does the left-handed person use the paper with the right hand, lifting the right buttock, or vice versa?

>toilet paper is better than nothing, but it still smears and spreads the problem without entirely solving it. After all, how much toilet paper should be rationally used before flushing? Let us agree that a whole roll will end up clogging anything. Would it be three double sheets of 15 cm? Or four?

>would the taxpayer need to flush before considering the work concluded? Stand up and sit down again? Or finish standing up? Where do the underpants stay? (or the panties?).

>as for the little sprayers, does only the water jet solve it? Does one need to scrub? Does one need soap? Does the person hold the little sprayer with one hand and “rinse” or “scrub” with the other? How would it be? Both hands between the legs? Do they fit? One hand from one side and the other through the middle? Which hand with the little sprayer and which one for the “rinsing”? One hand from each side does not work because people still do not levitate. Dry with what?

>is the use of the little sprayer necessity, hygiene or acrobatics?

Along this line of digressions, many years ago, I heard the dear friend Vieira, also an engineer with experience in the sanitary field (former president of an important sanitation company), tell what his grandmother used to say in the early 1950s:

“_ The day will still come when even to shit we will have to pay.”

That day arrived a long time ago. In parallel, diseases also decreased, longevity, comfort and well-being increased, but it is still necessary for people to become aware that a modern world also requires more care and knowledge of the surroundings, not only of mobile phones and their “applications”.

Education, culture and hygiene are not only “cultural luxuries”, but also and mainly technical knowledge and health. Knowing a little bit about how the electro-hydraulic-structural system of a residence, a school, a business, in short, works, is useful and necessary culture for a nation to develop, and does no harm to anyone.

I would even say that education, hygiene and a minimum of technical knowledge are priorities in relation to what we understand as culture, which is what our oligarchies and colonizers inseminated in us and which end up being bourgeois luxuries.

All this without diminishing the arts, literature, philosophy, because there is no nation nor civilization without art, literature, philosophy, but depending on the stage in which the nation is, there are activities that are more essential and activities, let us say, less essential. Darci Ribeiro said it very well: Brazil is the only nation still in formation in the world. Still! One must not put the cart before the oxen. What is essential is essential; what is superfluous is also essential, but not that much. I think that “to a good listener, half a word is enough.”

The shit engineers (not shitty engineers) need to speak, perhaps shout, be heard and valued, and the dissemination of knowledge in basic sanitation (water, sewage and garbage) increased as a basic culture for the population.

This is “the role” of the sanitary engineer.

This “engineer’s toilet paper” is not to be discarded, neither in the trash bin, nor in the toilet bowl, nor from the concerns of planners, nor from those of citizens.

And for this role we need to be proud, to fight, without needing to be violent or rude, but without worrying about being politically correct because, many times, the “politically correct” only serves to silence reason and indignation, both so lacking nowadays.

Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer, chronicler and columnist, member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the Institute of Engineering # written in Jan 2023 R2026 Jan Ra, 6,526 characters.