It may have been out of fashion in British homes for 30 years – but experts say that washing your nether regions beats using toilet paper on both hygiene and environmental grounds

Bathroom news from the US, where entrepreneur Miki Agrawal, who co-founded the period-proof underwear company Thinx, “wants America to embrace the bidet”. Agrawal stepped down from Thinx last year after she was accused of sexual harassment, but has returned with a new company, Tushy, which makes devices that convert toilets into bidets. So is it time to forsake paper for water?

According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the equivalent of almost 270,000 trees is either flushed or dumped in landfills every day – and about 10% of this is toilet paper. Globally, according to one environmental group, we use enough toilet paper to stretch around the planet every two minutes, or stretch to the sun and back every 10 days. Scientific American reports that switching to bidets “could save some 15m trees”.

It would also, it seems, be better for us. “In the bidet v toilet paper matchup, the nod goes to the bidet. Bidets are healthier than toilet paper. They provide better personal hygiene,” says the US urologist Dr Philip Buffington. Rose George, author of The Big Necessity, a book about the “unmentionable world of human waste and why it matters”, is blunter: “I think only using toilet paper to wipe is pretty filthy, and it’s quite an achievement of the toilet paper industry to have persuaded us that we are clean. My Toto Washlet travel bidet has just broken and I’m bereft.”

According to Toto, the Japanese company that invented the Washlet in 1980, George is not alone in her attachment to the “warm water cleaning system”, which features remote controls, heated seats and bidet functions. Since launching in Europe in 2009, it says sales have doubled year-on-year, with Britain initially stubborn, but growing keener. That stubbornness is not surprising. Before the advent of modern heating, the cold weather meant cleaning your nether regions with water wasn’t ideal for the British, particularly if you weren’t rich. The logic of using toilet paper became enshrined, despite bidets becoming fashionable in the 70s and 80s, with British people returning from holidays in Europe ready to inject a little continental sophistication into their homes.

Ten years ago, bathroom manufacturers in the UK were heralding the demise of the bidet. In 2010, B&Q said that, while once it sold thousands of bidets a year, at that point it was barely shifting 500. Homes no longer had enough space; people no longer had enough money.

The architecture professor Alexander Kira has written that, in the 19th century, Hindus refused to believe that Europeans cleaned themselves with paper, thinking the story a “vicious libel”. Perhaps now is the time for us to change our ways and live up to that noble conception.

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