Toilet Roll
Documentary series. Gregg Wallace explores the factory that makes 700,000 toilet rolls a day and Cherry Healey gets the bum deal of following a flush through the sewers.
Gregg Wallace explores the Manchester factory that produces 700,000 toilet rolls a day. He begins 940 miles away in Sweden, where the raw material - wood - is harvested from a sustainable forest of one billion spruce trees. Most of the wood is used for timber, but the offcuts are turned into sheets of wood pulp. Gregg follows this pulp to Manchester, where he learns that two types of wood fibre - long and short - are required for a loo roll, to give it strength but also softness. He watches as 3,750 kilos of fibre are combined with 34,000 litres of water and sprayed into a 40-metre-long, 11-metre-high paper-making machine. It takes just four seconds for the watery pulp mix to be transformed into soft, dry paper. It is then rolled onto a 1.2 tonne supersized toilet roll known as a 'mother reel'. Each one of these gives birth to 25,000 individual toilet rolls.
Meanwhile, Cherry Healey is at Britain's oldest toilet factory, where they churn out 1,000 loos a day. And she gets the bum deal of following the flush through the sewers and water treatment works of Brighton, finding out how sewage is cleared of debris, grease and bacteria, and transformed into clean water in a little over an hour after flushing. She has a cheeky encounter with a high-tech Japanese toilet and heads to Cranfield University to see a prototype toilet that does away with the need for water altogether. Could this be the toilet of the future that gives one-third of the world's population access to efficient sanitation?
Historian Ruth Goodman finds out what was used to wipe with before the invention of toilet paper. She discovers that the weapon of choice in the American midwest was a dried-out corn cob. And that it wasn't until the 1930s that toilet paper was guaranteed 'splinter free'. She is also in myth-busting mode, finally laying to rest the idea that Thomas Crapper invented the modern toilet. She heads into the House of Lords to check out an 18th-century flushing toilet, still in use today, and discovers that the Great Stink of 1858 expedited a period of sanitary invention that led to the toilet we know today.
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A match made in toilet paper heaven
Duration: 01:16
Music Played
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Katy Perry
California Gurls (feat. Snoop Dogg)
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Steps
Firefly
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Anne-Marie
Heavy
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Take That
River
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The Phoenix Foundation
Buffalo
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Paloma Faith
Guilty
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Stereophonics
All In One Night
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
The Sleeping Beauty (Panorama)
Orchestra: London Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Andr茅 Previn. -
Bad Sounds
Living Alone
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Crystal Fighters
Live For You
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Anne-Marie
Then
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Rita Ora
Your Song
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Fyfe
Stronger
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Fickle Friends
Vanilla
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Royal Blood
Figure it Out
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Rae Morris
Lower The Tone
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Eliza and the Bear
It Gets Cold
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Ray BLK
Doing Me
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Fickle Friends
Hard To Be Myself
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Paloma Faith
Till I'm Done
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Louis Berry
25 Reasons
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Bastille
Shame
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Calvin Harris
Acceptable In The 80s
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Chase & Status
This Moment - Instrumental
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Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds
She Taught Me How To Fly (Edit)
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CHVRCHES
Clearest Blue
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Kygo
ID
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Tigertown
Warriors
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Dua Lipa
Be The One
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Laura Mvula
Phenomenal Woman
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Coldplay
All I Can Think About Is You
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Tom Grennan
Found What I've Been Looking For
Credits
Role | Contributor |
---|---|
Presenter | Ruth Goodman |
Presenter | Cherry Healey |
Presenter | Gregg Wallace |
Production Company | Voltage TV Productions Ltd |
Music | Steve Tait |
Sound | Geraint Lewis |
Sound | Simon Cross |
Director of photography | Chris Titus-King |
Camera Operator | Rhys Plume |
Colourist | Tim O'Brien |
On-line editing | Jamie 91热爆 |
Re-recording mixer | Michael Wood |
Runner | Celeste Harper-Davis |
Runner | Natalie Chodakowska |
Production Coordinator | Rachel Drew |
Production Manager | Samara Friend |
Editor | Tim Hansen |
Editor | Ruth Horner |
Assistant Producer | Katie Louise Clarke |
Assistant Producer | Fran Jarvis |
Producer | Phillip Smith |
Executive Producer | Jon Alwen |
Executive Producer | Sanjay Singhal |
Director | Emma Pound |
Series Editor | Amanda Lyon |
Learn more about the history of the factory and how it has evolved with an interactive from The Open University.
The fascinating stories behind the production of some of our favourite products.