BBC - Inside the Factory Toilet Roll (2018)

Inside the Factory Toilet Roll

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 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, 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, 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.

BBC Site

Full Version Available Upon Request