Move over plastic, wood and paper! Bamboo is the rage. There are winners and losers in this eco-game and bamboo is a big, big winner. You can buy bamboo tooth brushes, kitchen ware, keyboards and, yes, toilet paper. This last is what I want to talk to you about - bamboo toilet paper.

Before we talk “bamboo”, however, let’s talk toilet paper.

It's one of the great mysteries of life. Why are there so many different kinds of toilet paper? Aren't posteriors all built the same way. How can wiping your rear be such a complex deal?

If you go to a supermarket you can find at least 6 different manufacturers each marketing at least 6 different kinds of toilet paper. There is, regular (normally single-ply), soft (two-ply), very soft (thicker two-ply), ultra soft (three-ply), and ridiculously soft (ridiculously soft three-ply). The last of these is similar to wiping yourself with a pillow. Louis the IV, who had his butt wiped for him, would have loved it.

Then, of course, there is the dreaded half-ply toilet paper. This material is so thin that there is only paper on one side. It is entirely two-dimensional. It is necessary to apply at least a half a roll to get the job done. This product is not sold in stores. You can only find it in very cheap motels and in the bathrooms of particle physicists who are always mesmerized by singularities of this nature.

In Switzerland I got to use a bedet. For those of you unfamiliar with a bedet, it's a toilet with kind of a squirt gun installed in it. It was a little weird at first but then I got to like it. It did a good job. In the future, to save water, maybe they'll use lasers of some kind? I think a laser could do the job but it would have to be expertly calibrated.

In the meantime we use toilet paper which is one of the most environmentally unfriendly paper products around. The number of trees slaughtered and natural resources used to make toilet paper is staggering. All this to pamper our posterior. I researched the numbers of trees that sacrificed their life to become roles of little white squares. Here is what I found.

“One tree produces about 100 pounds of toilet paper and about 83 million roles are produced per day. Global toilet paper production consumes 27,000 trees daily. More than seven billion rolls of toilet paper are sold yearly in the United States alone. Americans use an average of 23.6 rolls per capita a year.”

Reusable toilet paper is the answer although it must be a difficult concept since no one has come up with it yet. I’m working on it; so far, no success.

So this is where bamboo toilet paper comes in. This stuff grows fast and can be planted in vast portions of the globe. Enormous numbers of trees and vast quantities of water can be saved. If you can believe it, it is both stronger and softer. Sure it's more expensive but you can find it for about a buck a roll while that "pillow-paper" I talked about earlier nicks you about the same. Just cut down on the number of squares you use. I've got my order in. If you can afford the the few cents extra, we definitely need you on board on this one.

While using bamboo toilet paper may be a small step for one person, it's a giant leap for mankind.