July 11 (UPI) -- Officials in a Chinese city are saving money on toilet paper in public restrooms by employing facial recognition technology in the stalls.

A video of the system installed at a Fuzhou, Fujian Province, public restroom shows workers filling a locked dispenser machine with toilet paper before a customer demonstrates how the mechanism works.


The machine uses facial recognition software to identify the user and vends exactly 27.5 inches of toilet paper, the maximum allowed by the machine.

Officials said a user must wait 9 minutes before the machine will allow them to get another length of paper. They said the system has cut the amount of toilet paper used in restrooms by half.