For Your Budget, Your Planet and Your Behind

Improve personal hygiene, be environmentally friendly and save money.

Let's be honest, toilet paper is not a hygienic solution. Yet, we find novelty in the bidet.

The average American uses 60 sheets of toilet paper a day. Ladies, credit your men...we're bringing down the average! This amounts to over 37 billion rolls of toilet paper every year. If we assume a 24 pack of Charmin costs $10, we're talking about a $15 billion/year industry. The environmental costs are equally astonishing, according to sustainlane.com toilet paper production consumes 15 million trees and over 473 billion gallons of water annually.

What can you do?

I'm not advocating the elimination of toilet paper. I'm pro-T.P., but I'm also pro-hygiene and pro-environment. As a compliment to toilet paper and a means to limit its use consider these solutions.

• A bathroom sprayer is easy to install, costs less than $50 and will pay back in just a few months. Home Depot sells this model.
  
• For gadget geeks, a high tech bidet (if you've ever seen one, they're pretty cool) can run anywhere from a couple hundred dollars on up. Toto, a Japanese manufacturer, is just one firm launching a campaign to push awareness.

Go Green!