[MUSIC]

Joan Cartan-Hansen, Host: The
toilet paper you have in your

house is a fairly recent
invention.

Before that, people used leaves,
a shared stick with a sponge,

even pages from the Sears
Roebuck catalog.

But when sewage and wastewater
systems were being installed,

they found those old catalog
pages clogged up the pipes.

So in the 1850's, Joseph Gayetty
began selling boxed sheets of

hemp-based paper.

Toilet paper today is made from
trees.

The bark is taken off the wood
and is chipped into small

pieces.

The wood chips are mixed with
water and chemicals to make a

slurry and the slurry is cooked,
creating a pulp.

Once the paper is dried, it's
scraped off onto large sheets.

Those sheets are wound onto
large rolls called paper logs.

Then the logs are cut and
wrapped into packages of toilet

paper.

Toilet paper is specifically
designed to dissolve after

flushing, thus savings all of us
from plumbing disaster.

For more information about
sewage, check out the science

trek website.

You'll find it at science trek
dot org