The jaw-dropping complexity of manufacturing even the simplest thing
At 6.30 on a dark March morning back in 2020, I reached from under the covers to silence my beeping phone. Drawing it to my face, muscle memory guided my thumb to the BBC News app. Squinting at the screen, my half-awake brain struggled to decipher this headline:
Coronavirus: What's behind the great toilet roll grab?1
Typing that sentence now, 'the great toilet roll grab' has a comedic tinge to it. Some news outlets took things to amusing lengths: Australian newspaper prints extra pages to help out in toilet paper shortage.2 Others sneered on social media at those who rushed to stockpile toilet roll (while discreetly clicking '+1' on their own shopping orders) as the implications for daily life of COVID-19-related lockdowns became clear. Those empty shelves in the supermarket personal hygiene aisles were symbolic of a much bigger and more worrying issue.
The global pandemic of the early 2020s revealed how extraordinarily delicate the system is that connects all the companies and people that make, distribute and sell us consumer staples such as food and toiletries. When it works well, we take it for granted; when it judders or grinds to a halt, we are jolted to disbelief and outrage. Why is a system that is essential for our daily lives so fragile that it collapses at the first sign of trouble?
To understand that, 'the great toilet roll grab' gives us an informative case study. Before revealing the details of that particular pandemic-induced psychodrama, though, we first need to understand how these soft sheets of paper end up in our toilets and bathrooms in non-crisis times.
How to make toilet paper
Back in 2020, my knowledge of the process of making loo roll was rather limited. I knew that trees and some kind of rolling mill were involved, but what happened between those two points and beyond was somewhat hazy.* So, I went to find out how this whole specific manufacturing system works.
To help share what I found out, I first need you to do a little practical exercise.
If you are able to do so, please put down this book or device and go and find a roll of toilet paper. Tear off one single sheet and take a good look at it. You'll see that it's a rectangle measuring about ten by twelve centimetres, possibly with some pattern or lettering on the surface. It will have wispy tufts along the short edges, the residue of the perforations that allowed you to separate it from its neighbour with a precisely calculated amount of force. You might also notice that the paper is textured or slightly crinkled - this is a feature added during the production process to improve absorbency.
If you tease the edge of the sheet, you should be able to separate it into two, three, four or - if you are very posh - possibly five separate layers (or 'ply'). If you have managed to separate the ply, run your fingers over each surface. You might be able to detect a slight difference in the texture, partly a result of the glue used to bond the layers. This is also an indication of the different lengths of fibres stacked up within each single ply to ensure the optimum balance of strength and softness. A single ply could be a blend of pulp from Scandinavian trees (good for strength) with that from South American trees (good for softness).
Decades of research by engineers and scientists have resulted in the product now partially disassembled in your hand. Armies of people have been involved in the designing, making and delivering of this most basic of products to you at the right price and quality for your particular budget and preference. In countries where toilet paper is commonly used,┼ Portfolio.the average consumer will use over one hundred rolls per year.3 Each of those sheets has made a remarkable journey to reach your hand. I'd now like to take you to a midge-infested location that illustrates one possible starting point of that journey.
From tree to pulp╬
I'm standing beside a loch in the Highlands of Scotland, feeling a bit sorry for myself. The morning had started well. I'd drunk my early morning coffee sitting on a grassy slope under blue skies, listening to tweeting birds and smelling bracken warming in the sun. Now, up in the muggy damp hills, I'm sweaty, tired and bleeding. I love Scotland, but in summer, there are two things that can distract you from enjoying the stunning landscapes: the tiny midges that irritatingly cloud around and latch on to exposed skin, and the tenacious horseflies that feast on any flesh that is stupid enough to present itself before them.
Once I paused my swatting and swearing long enough to look up, what I could see laid out before me was extraordinary. Surrounding all sides of the insect-infested loch, carpeting the rolling hills as far as my eyes could see, were millions of densely and darkly packed identical trees. This was not leafy, ancient woodland: this was industrial production of coniferous trees, grown as a crop to provide raw material for construction, energy and, of course, paper.
In the UK, around twenty thousand people work on planting and chopping down trees. Add in all the people involved in various things that get done to the wood once harvested - sawmilling, pulping and making panels, paper and, well, anything made of wood - and the number swells to around 140,000. Together, these people are worth around £8 billion to the UK economy. Globally, the forestry sector employs more than twenty million people directly and forty-five million indirectly. And they generate $0.5 trillion and $1.3 trillion respectively. Key point: it's a big industry.4
Given that trees rather obstinately refuse to grow very fast, forestry is an industry with long production cycles. From seeding to felling takes decades - between forty and 150 years, depending on the type of tree and purpose for which the wood is needed.
The tree production cycle has four phases. First, there is preparation (from seed to little sapling), then planting (a very manual process of sticking each sapling into a mound of earth) and then thinning (as saplings are planted very close together to protect them from the elements during their pre-school years, the ones that survive to teenagers are then too close to each other and need weeding out before they fully mature). Finally, once the appropriate number of decades has passed, the harvesting can begin.5 And in the same way that sophisticated technology has been developed to harvest food crops (such as giant combine harvesters dustily churning their satisfyingly neat way through golden wheat fields), the world of forestry also has some frankly terrifying-looking machines to deploy.
Pretty much everything about 'tree harvesting' or 'forestry harvesting' machines is impressive.§ Long gone are gangs of axe- or even chainsaw-wielding lumberjacks in the world of commercial forestry. Instead, think Japanese anime-style Transformers but with rather dull names such as the Komatsu 931XC-2020 or John Deere 1470G, which come with multi-six-figure price tags. They all look a bit like what you'd expect some over-caffeinated engineers to come up with when asked to build a giant robot lumberjack from spare parts lying around in a farming equipment factory. These machines have big wheels or tracks (to allow off-road traversing of steep inclines), a power unit, an operator's cab (the interior of which is filled with joysticks, screens and a ludicrous number of buttons) and a long, articulated arm, at the end of which dangles a slightly mad collection of toothed wheels, chainsaws, blades and sensors. The operation of these highly analogue machines is enabled by digital wizardry that allows the operator to plan and manage the whole felling process with military precision.
Before the first tree is touched, the operator plans each phase of the chopping, marking out areas for storing logs and ensuring that trees not yet ready for the brutal embrace of the 931XC-2020 or 1470G remain untouched.
The act of felling is indecently speedy. The dangly bit on the end of the harvesting machine's arm opens a set of jaws which grab the base of the tree. An in-built chainsaw slices through the trunk and the tree falls from vertical to horizontal, still gripped at its base by the jaws. The machine's sensors then measure the diameter and height of the tree, and its on-board tech works out the optimal way of cutting up that particular tree that minimises waste. With this information, in a blur of spinning wheels, whirring blades and flying woodchips, the machine feeds the tree laterally through its clenched jaws, stripping off all small branches and stopping exactly at the points where the chainsaw can slice the stripped trunk to the right lengths for different uses. The chopped trunks and spindly top branches are then neatly stacked, ready for collection.
Decades of growth, gone in sixty seconds.
Once these lumberjack Transformers have completed their brutal mission, the separate parts of the trees are shipped...
