Bowl or Bin?
Where do I put used toilet paper?
So you have already answered the question "Wipe or wash? Toilet paper or water?" You decided on toilet paper. Go ahead, that's a personal choice. A very personal choice. Keep it to yourself, I don't care to hear about it. You now have one last but very important question to answer
Where do I put my used toilet paper?
Toilet on board a Bulgarian train from София (Sofia) to Горна Оряховица (Gorna Oryahovitsa). Bombs away!
If you are in a train with an old style toilet that simply dumps onto the track, just throw it down there and litter the countryside. That seems wrong, but good luck finding anywhere else to put it! And this is why they tell you not to use the toilet while the train is in the station.
Toilet and waste bin at Hostel Mostel in Велико Търново (Veliko Târnovo), Bulgaria. Nice and modern and very clean, but use that waste bin!
It is very important to realize that many countries' plumbing is not designed to handle toilet paper, and putting your used paper in the bowl is likely to cause severe problems.
If it's a squat toilet or if you
are in eastern Europe —
Toilet paper should not be put into most squat
toilets, as they are usually plumbed into systems
not intended to handle paper.
Eastern European plumbing systems also were not designed
to handle paper.
There should be a small waste bin next to the toilet,
place used paper in there.
If there is no waste bin, then use your tissue paper
sparingly, put it in the toilet, and flush it vigorously.
Then deny all knowledge of the event.
The bowl-bin dividing line, the "Paper Curtain" if you will, is pretty much the old Iron Curtain.
Paper goes into the bin, not the bowl, anywhere in Europe within or east of the countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia (and with this advice I risk your plugging older toilets in eastern Germany, ex-DDR), continuing east and south across Eastern Europe and the former USSR, all of Asia, and the Middle East, and continuing south through Egypt and undoubtedly beyond there through most of Africa.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
