Shanghai citizens don’t deserve free toilet paper

Shanghai authorities mulling a free toilet paper service for the city's public lavatories recently conducted a trial run to gauge the costs and see how citizens would respond. The outcome was disconcerting.



Over the course of the 6-month test in Jiang'an district, public toilet users consumed an average length of 1.6 meters (5.2 feet) of rolled toilet paper per visit. That's 2 feet more than the international standard of 3.2 feet per visit. According to Jiefang Daily, it was determined that many visitors used the free paper for unintended purposes or pilfered it for personal use.



Shanghai has a bad track record when it comes to public toilets. A free toilet paper trial last year at the Shanghai Zoo, which sees an average of 5,000 visitors per day, was quickly scrapped due to bathroom attendants being unable to keep up with the sheer volume of demand.



A related public service in Shanghai last year also ended farcically. To accommodate the high number of wealthy housewives who shopped there, the lavish Henderson Metropolitan Mall on Nanjing Road East opened a public nursing mothers' station, fully stocked with complimentary diapers, wet wipes, sanitizers and sterilizers and even mechanized breast pumps. Can you guess what happened?



As reported by the Shanghai Morning Post, in the blink of an eye, these supposedly upper-class shoppers purloined everything from the room. It's comical to picture some nouveau-riche mommy stuffing stolen Pampers into her Prada, but that's exactly what occurred.



There are 17 districts in the municipality, with 2,600 public lavatories. This puts the estimated total cost of the proposed toilet paper service at 20,500 yuan ($3,305) per public toilet, or 53 million yuan per year for the whole city. That's no small sum.



In Hongkou district last year, bathroom attendants reported that users started stealing entire rolls of free paper right out of the dispenser. These aren't all peasants; some of them are middle-class residents intentionally abusing a public service. The attendants then moved the toilet paper to their service window, which seemed to help, however, this was just a temporary solution to a large-scale problem.



As many public toilets are unmanned, it would require a massive hiring campaign and at least an additional 63 million yuan to staff all 2,600 public toilets.



Regardless of the costs or even the ethics, please tell me why anyone in Shanghai needs free toilet paper in the first place? Per capita disposable income in Shanghai was 47,710 yuan in 2014, the highest in China. Surely the average resident here can afford their own Kleenex.



And then there's the greater issue of our nation's income gap. Economic disparity and an imbalanced distribution of resources are major issues affecting our society. Allocating the surplus in Shanghai's municipal resources to other provinces where rural citizens desperately need modernized public facilities is one solution that comes to mind.



But the tragic fact is that, due to global-scale clear-cutting, there is presently a worldwide shortage of paper. Japan's Ministry of Economy recently advised its population to stockpile toilet paper to prepare for an emergency, and in February the government of Venezuela announced widespread shortages of toilet paper, going so far as to seize control of its largest toilet paper factory.



Even if China imported the public toilet paper instead of cutting down our own forests, the impact of 24 million people in Shanghai alone consuming, nay, overusing public toilet paper would be ecologically ruinous.



But these are moot arguments, because, frankly, we as a privileged populous simply do not deserve any free luxuries. In spite of - or perhaps due to - our surging economy and rising incomes, we have proven ourselves to be selfish, irresponsible and wasteful.



Until we can redeem ourselves, there's absolutely no good reason why we should be wiping our bums on the city's dime.

