Don't dispose, try dirt instead!

Disposable culture has reached new heights in America. We all have an aversion to things gross (messes, spills, and of course dirty toilets and bathrooms). Well, this article I saw last week (now heartlessly stashed away in the NY Times paid archive) covers the development of new disposable toilet wands. The head is detachable, allowing the germ-averse cleaner to trash the head of the wand rather than risk facing it again the next time the bathroom needs cleaning.

It just so happens that I had recently cleaned a toilet when this article came out, and I did it the old fashioned way. I put cleaner on a scrub and actually touched the parts of the toilet that my butt does. Yes, I even scrubbed away the splash damage. Although I did wash and rinse the scrub, I did not throw it away.

See, the amazing part of these cleaners is that they clean things. Including the scrub. So unless you have large chunks of poo to clean off your toilet, you don’t really need to toss your scrubs after every cleaning. In fact, you can just as easily wash the scrub as you did the toilet.

America has gone overboard toward disinfecting and disposing of everything. First of all, there’s the trash – 3.5 pounds per person per day. A third of that trash is from packaging, just to show us the brand name on our Oreo cookies or Cheerios cereal. The there’s the dirt-aversion. We throw away 49 million diapers per day to avoid cleaning. And thanks to Swiffer mops, clean wipes, and disposable toilet wands, we can now avoid touching even the second-hand dirt – the things that clean.

It reminds me of a thing I read on polio in college. Polio was a disease of the rich. Poor kids caught it as toddlers as a cold, developed immunity, and were protected. Rich kids were kept safely quarantined and cleaned, encountered the virus later in life when it was more likely to cause paralysis, and suffered.