Forget spending a penny.
Last year in the UK, we spent £2.5 billion on toilet roll.
That's about 100 rolls per person.
Used on an average of six daily trips to the loo.
Tonight we follow the journey your toilet roll takes - 940 miles,
from forest...
..to factory.
It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep up...
..with demand.
I'm Gregg Wallace.
If King Kong used toilet paper, that'd be the one he used!
And I'll be discovering the extraordinary technology
behind this most ordinary bathroom essential.
Toilet paper at 40mph,
scraped off with the biggest razor blade in the world.
That's the way we do it!
GREG LAUGHS
I'm Cherry Healey.
Oh! What is that?!
I'm getting hands on at Britain's oldest toilet factory...
Is this going to toilet heaven?
..and having a cheeky encounter with a futuristic loo.
OK, here comes the wand!
Woohoo!
And Ruth Goodman...
Richard! Hello.
..gets to the bottom of our historical toilet habits.
At my nan's house, if you ran out of loo paper, there was a nail.
In the next 24 hours, this place will produce
more than 700,000 toilet rolls.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Essity mill in Manchester.
This 27 acre site produces 130 tonnes of tissue every day.
That's kitchen roll as well as loo roll.
But tonight, we are following the production of their bestseller...
Cushelle two-ply toilet paper.
Before we can start making the paper, we need one vital ingredient.
Trees.
And these ones are growing on the remote east coast of Sweden.
What an absolutely beautiful place.
They normally only let me walk around factories.
This 6.5 million acre sustainable forest is larger than Wales,
and contains more than a billion spruce and pine trees.
Bjorn Lingfelt has been in the timber and paper business
for over 30 years.
Bjorn! Hi there.
What a beautiful place to come to work every day!
It is!
That undoubtedly is an incredible piece of machinery.
It is indeed. It's a harvester.
It cuts trees, takes off the branches and then cuts the stem
in logs of different qualities.
Look, look, look! He's got one now.
Look! La, la, la, la, la!
This is where our toilet roll production line begins.
Wow, that's the bit I like!
Look at that!
The harvester chops down nearly 1,500
of these 30 metre tall trees every day.
Half the wood produced is shipped around the world to make products
like furniture and window frames.
The other half, the offcuts,
is the raw material for all kinds of paper - including toilet roll.
The sub-zero temperatures here mean the trees grow slowly,
producing high-quality wood.
How long does a tree take to grow, Bjorn?
These trees here, they are about 100 years old.
If you can cut down a tree in minutes,
and it takes 100 years to grow... Yep?
..does that mean you're running out of trees?
No, no, we have the world's greatest tree nursery,
growing 100 million trees per annum.
So you are planting more trees than you are cutting down?
We are planting far more trees than what we are cutting down.
Huge 35 tonne grapplers lift our logs onto a waiting lorry.
Then they are driven 16 miles to a saw mill,
where they are cut into square sections of timber.
And the leftovers are chopped to produce wood chips,
which are what we need.
They take a short hop to the largest pulp mill in the world.
It receives 20 of these 45 tonne deliveries every day.
This place is massive!
Two hours and 36 minutes into our toilet paper production...
..the woodchips head to the digester.
We started off with this...
Yeah, the woodchips, right? ..coming into this mill.
Now we'll see what we've done with it.
May I? Yes, please. It's a bit hot.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, it's hot! This is cellulose pulp.
What we have in these woodchips is a number of wood substances of which
cellulose is one, about 50% of it.
We cook those chips with chemicals in order to separate the fibres
and the good substances.
Cellulose exists in the cell walls of plants,
giving them their basic structure.
Put simply, it's nature's building blocks.
And what are the properties of cellulose
that make it ideal for toilet paper?
It is strong, it is very clean, and this kind of pulp is ideal
for making toilet paper hold together.
Then is that now ready to ship to Manchester?
No, it's not. First, it's wet,
and we don't want to send water to Manchester.
There is already water in Manchester, I've heard.
Second, these fibres are entangled and knotty
and we need to sort them out.
But sorting them out seems to involve even more water.
The soggy fibres are sent to a steamy machine
called the pulp former.
That, to me, looks like a fast flowing river of boiling milk.
What on earth is that?!
That's actually the same fibre that we saw a minute ago,
but here they are disentangled.
We have mixed them up with lots and lots of water and then
we are spraying them out of this wire, as it's called.
The wire is a 40 metre long revolving sieve
through which the water drains away,
leaving a two millimetre thick cellulose sheet behind.
If you'd have asked me to make a list of the things I would
least expect to find making toilet paper,
it would have been a fast-flowing river of porridge. Yep.
It's amazing.
Pretty cool, isn't it? It's hot like a Swedish sauna.
The neatly-arranged cellulose is flattened between rollers...
..then run through a series of driers behind this vast orange wall.
It emerges as a continuous sheet of dried pulp...
..which is sliced into 70 centimetre rectangular pieces.
This machine looks like it's dealing out playing cards.
Yep, sure. And that is stacking up now, what, usable sheets?
This is the end product of this pulping.
That can now get shipped to Manchester?
Yes. This is bone dry pulp,
ready to be used in the papermaking process in Manchester.
Bjorn, thank you, it was fascinating.
Been a pleasure. And it was nice to be out in the snow.
These hard, thick sheets have a long way to go before they are the soft,
absorbent paper we expect in our bathrooms.
And softness has always been toilet roll's ultimate sales pitch.
Cute puppies and toilet paper,
they go together like fish and chips or jelly and ice cream.
But if you think about it, it's a really odd combination, isn't it?
Almost illogical, really.
The connection between puppies and paper...
..was first made in this famous advert in 1972.
Former ad man Carl Jones tells me
the partnership was a happy accident.
The original idea by the advertising agency J Walter Thompson
was the child running with the roll of toilet paper,
and the regulators thought it produced the idea of wastefulness,
and that children would be encouraged to waste,
so the... OK. ..agency went back
and they came up with this idea of a dog,
a small, innocent dog that took the toilet paper and ran with it.
And they were sort of emphasising
not so much the usefulness of the product,
but more the emotions that it's supposed to conjure up.
Yes, and you're showing an idealised world,
and this is what life could be like if you buy this product
and bring it home.
And how successful was it?
Apparently, the market share of this specific brand went up to 30%.
This advert transformed loo roll advertising for ever.
But it hasn't always been paper we've reached for in the bathroom.
What we need is a toilet historian.
Richard. Hello!
And here he is! Richard Smith.
And where better to meet than an old public lavatory?
So Richard, before there was commercial toilet paper,
what did we all use?
Well, for centuries people were, so to speak,
taking matters into their own hands.
There's things like the notorious sponge on a stick which dates from
Ancient Rome. You used it, rinsed it off in a vat of vinegar
and you left it for the next user.
In America, the corn cob with the corn removed and dried out...
Oh, gosh! ...was kind of emblematic of rural American society.
Really?! It was really treasured as an icon of that way of life.
When papers started being widely manufactured,
people did the obvious.
They put it in their outhouses and their toilets
and used it for that purpose.
Do you know, I actually remember doing this,
because in my nan's house,
if you ran out of loo paper, there was a nail!
SHE LAUGHS
I suppose that sort of raises the question, why did we move from that
to what we have now?
Commercial toilet paper. When it was launched
there was no obvious need for it, and so when Joseph Gayetty cooked up
the idea in the middle of the 19th century in New York,
his masterstroke was to create not just toilet paper,
but medicated toilet paper.
Loo roll as we know it gained popularity
thanks to some good old-fashioned scaremongering.
Adverts in the 1920s suggested that newspaper ink could cause
fatal illness, and that the only way to avoid a grisly death
was to wipe with this exciting new product,
although these early rolls came with their own hazards.
The quality was extremely questionable.
There was one product that was actually sold with the selling point
of being splinter-free. Sp...
Which...you know, you would think was just a given
when you are buying a toilet paper. You would.
It was only later that, as the technology advanced,
two-ply paper became possible, which was softer, more absorbent.
As the paper got softer, the message did too...
So much so that it wasn't always clear what the ads were for.
So at the very moment in which toilet paper becomes more useful,
it's getting better at doing its job,
is the very moment
that the advertisers stop talking about it doing its job.
Absolutely, we're moving into the age of euphemism here.
We're leaving behind this frightening talk
about toilet illnesses which dominated the advertising,
certainly before the Second World War,
and we're moving into the luxury product.
And luxury led straight to labradors...
Aren't you gorgeous?!
..an ingenious way to suggest softness and cleanliness.
Toilet paper puppies mark a real watershed
in the marketing of this product.
Today, all the brands emphasise comfort
and try to produce a warm, emotional connection with their product.
No-one ever felt that way about a corn cob!
My wood pulp has made the 940 mile journey from the forests of Sweden
to the factory in Manchester.
At the intake area, it's ready to be turned into loo roll.
Seven lorries arrive here every day,
each one laden with 28 tonnes of pulp from all over the world.
Mill manager Jim Lang is overseeing the delivery.
That's the pulp that you've seen made in Sweden.
Why do you need a massive, massive factory to just turn that,
that looks like paper already, into paper?
You'd be forgiven for thinking that that's quite close
to the finished product, but it's nowhere near.
That's a lot of pulp.
I mean, many people would consider that fiction. Oh...
Like my jokes, wood pulp comes in different qualities.
It's categorised into short and long fibre and we need both types.
This is the pulp from Sweden, OK?
So, this is your long fibre.
This pulp is from Brazil, this is eucalyptus,
this is short fibre.
Sweden, long fibre. Yeah. Brazil, short fibre.
Correct. Right. It's a bit like a salsa meets a smorgasbord.
Yeah, so if you take that, that's the short fibre.
You rip that.
Yeah?
Now rip that.
Whoa, this is a lot stronger.
You see the difference?
Whoa. Most certainly the one from Sweden is harder to rip.
That is as tough as old boots.
I mean, remember what we've got to do with this thing.
You want strength, but you only want it for a few seconds.
You've got to put some South American stuff in it.
If we were just to use that,
it would be too rough and it would also be difficult to flush.
Yeah. Right?
Softness is what we're going to try and maximise and bring out
using this pulp.
We're going to blend those two pulps together, Gregg,
and you're going to make a batch, so...
Really? Yep, come on. Am I going to get wet and messy?
The long and short of it is, we need both fibres to make our loo roll.
We're starting with the strong Swedish long fibre...
..which takes a leisurely trip up a conveyor belt
into the papermaking area.
And then, ten hours and 21 minutes into the production process,
tumbles into a super-sized mixer...
..where I am with process engineer Mark Spooner.
This is where the action is at, then?
This is the pulper. This is where we mix these bales with water in here.
When I was out in Sweden, it took ages to dry those fibres,
why are you making them soaking wet?
Everything needs to be wet
so you can actually create a uniform sheet downstream.
We can only do that when it's diluted with water,
completely diluted with water.
This huge pulper mixes 3750kg of fibre
with 34,000 litres of water.
As the bales fall in, a blade spins at 1500rpm and rips them up.
So that literally is blades like a mixer at home,
whizzing the water round
and you are, bit by bit, like, adding enormous stock cubes.
Yes. And you're going to come out with a thick gravy, is that right?
A v... Sorry, I just think about things in terms of food!
Essentially at the end, it will just be a thick pulp,
a thick gravy for us to send forward.
Once all the bales are in, a further 11,000 litres of water are added.
After 14 minutes of mixing, the pulp is just 4% fibre, and 96% water.
How old are you, Mark? 24.
And so if you meet somebody you like, and they ask you what you do,
what do you tell them? I tell them I make toilet roll.
It's recession-proof. At the end of the day,
everyone's always going to need the product that we produce.
And that's your bottom line?
That's always my bottom line, yeah!
Since we're on the subject of bottoms...
..Cherry is making toilets.
Armitage Shanks have been making sanitaryware here in Staffordshire
for the last 150 years.
Britain's oldest bathroom factory churns out more than
1,000 ceramic loos a day.
It all starts with the delivery of 30 tonnes of powdered clay.
When I was a kid, one of my favourite things in the world
was playing with clay. So this is like heaven on Earth!
Ashley Spink has worked here for 20 years.
So, where has this come from?
This has come from Cornwall. So does it come out of the earth
looking like that?
No, Cherry, it's mined as clay, and then it's refined
and dried out and transported to us like this.
I mean, it's mixing with water right here,
and I can feel how sticky it is.
Yeah. It's actually quite hard to lift my shoe up.
This really gives me a sense of how strong this stuff is. Yeah.
Our powder is combined with 360 litres of water,
sand and sodium silicate,
turning it into liquid clay.
Now called slip, this is all they need to make toilets.
Oh, wow!
That looks very like an elephant's trunk.
This is the sieving process.
Underneath this vat here, we've got one of these.
We need to take out any contamination, coarse material,
we need to make sure this slip is as smooth as possible.
It takes four days for the mix to settle before it's ready
for the moulding machines.
Each one produces eight toilets at a time.
The slip is solidified under high pressure.
Then the soft, newly-formed loos are carefully removed by robots.
So how long is the slip in the mould?
The whole cycle time, it's 30 minutes and 20 seconds currently.
What happens if it's more or less than 30 minutes and 20 seconds?
If it's in the mould too long,
then we can get a problem where they can collapse.
So it's a very delicate process.
They need to be soft enough to mould,
but solid enough to hold their shape?
That's correct, yeah.
These brand-new loos have a long way to go before they're bathroom-ready.
While they're still soft, rough edges are quickly rubbed off.
I love that you have both the coolest robots ever at this factory,
but also, you still do stuff by hand.
It's all down to finesse, really.
All these pots are different,
they all need different things doing to them.
Because of slight variations,
the lip inside the rim of the bowl must be trimmed by hand.
Put the knife through, and we go all the way round...
..then we take the waste out.
Great. Wow! There we go.
Would you like a go?
What happens if I break it?
You're OK, don't worry.
You've got to be quite dextrous, don't you?
Woohoo!
Shall we have a look at the final piece? Yeah.
Well, it's a bit gnarly in places.
Is this going to toilet heaven?
It's going to the skip!
My toilet may have to be dumped...
..but the rest of the batch have made the grade.
They march into the drying tunnels...
..and emerge 16 hours later, drier, lighter, and 2.5% smaller.
OK, so this is the glaze robot area where we glaze the toilets.
Three coats of white glaze are applied.
White has always been the best seller, and currently accounts
for more than 99% of the toilets they produce here.
It gives it its finish and it's hygienic, too.
So it seals the deal? It certainly does.
The glaze takes another four hours to dry.
While this happens, they take a very sedate spin around the factory.
They're not quite ready to go, but they do look beautiful and perfect.
ALARM SOUNDS
Oh, here we go!
And finally, they face 17 hours in the 1,200 degree kiln.
This fixes the glaze.
These toilets have been on an immense three-day adventure.
They've been moulded, hand-finished, glazed and fired,
and now they're ready for a long life of service.
Ten hours and 35 minutes into the papermaking process...
..my long-fibre wood pulp is drained from the pulper,
and pushed along to a container known as a chest.
The short-fibre pulp has been through a parallel process,
and is sitting ready in its own chest.
Both mixes contain 4% fibre and 96% water.
But as they're pumped towards the next stage of production,
more water is added, taking them to 99.9% liquid.
So this is the 4% pulp.
That is the consistency of papier-mache.
At this point, we need to get that consistency down to 0.1%.
OK. That is dishwater.
There's a bit of fibre in there, I promise you.
That seems ludicrous to me.
You've taken something
that looked like it was going to become toilet paper,
to something that looks like it's going
to flush the toilet paper away. Yeah.
It's all stages of the process.
Well, I believe you, but it's quite incredible.
Where's all this water coming from?
Well, on site, it's 6,000 metres cubed, but we re-use that water.
Just in this process alone, we re-use the water 30 times.
Right, OK, you're not just chucking it away?
No, and even the water that becomes waste from this process,
we re-use another ten times around the site,
so we re-use water again and again and again.
All right. I thought we were just about to get millions of complaints.
Right, OK. OK, I get it.
You recycle all the water, all the time.
The watery mixes have until this point been kept firmly apart.
But now they're on a collision course with a 40-metre long,
11-metre high machine that will turn them from pulp to paper.
Wow! That looks like some sort of crazed church organ.
What is this? This is the first part of our paper machine.
This is known as the head box and it's a more complicated version of
the very steamy machine I saw in Sweden.
Over there, I was only dealing with one kind of fibre.
But here, we have two.
So, in this pipe and this pipe, we have the long fibre mixture.
In this pipe, we have our short fibre.
What happens is, that is driven down these pipes onto a sieve
that lets the water go straight through,
and all the fibre is stuck on the wire.
A five-metre wide wire filter loops through the machine.
Onto this, the pipes spray one layer of the short-fibre pulp
which will make our paper soft,
and two layers of the long-fibre pulp,
which will make our paper strong.
So you can have a look a little bit closer at where we spray it,
if you'd like.
This is where the jets are squirting the pulp that's going to
be paper, right? Yeah.
I'm really sorry, that does not resemble paper.
That is still water.
The purpose of the rest of this massive machine
is to remove this water.
Heated rollers push hot air up through the fibres,
fluffing them up,
adding extra softness, and eliminating 30% of the moisture.
Finally, 40 metres into its journey through this monster machine...
..the fibre reaches a huge 138-tonne, 12-metre high drier
called the Yankee.
Alan Morton is waiting for me.
Are you Alan? I am, Gregg, yes.
Are you in charge of that? I am responsible for this.
That is an absolute beast. It is, yeah.
This huge pressurised cylinder is heated to 170 degrees C,
and spins at 1,100 metres per minute.
As the fibre approaches,
a thin layer of glue sticks it onto the drum.
It's carried over the top,
where the heat evaporates off the remaining water.
At the bottom, a 5.7-metre-long razor blade scrapes it off...
..producing this fast-moving sheet of soft, dry paper.
You can see the actual blade,
it's scraping the paper off the Yankee at that point.
That must have to be a very precise angle?
Very precise angle.
From the point where I had that mush in my hand, to this point here,
has taken how long?
Well, from the head box, it's taken four seconds
before it gets to this point where it's coming off dry.
Look at that!
I'm glad you're impressed.
Toilet paper at 40 miles an hour, drying out, stuck on by glue
and scraped off with the biggest razor blade in the world.
That's the way we do it! Ha-ha-ha!
The wet pulp has been dramatically transformed into one enormous,
continuous sheet of paper.
But it will need cutting down to size before it's ready
for the average bathroom.
Ruth's doing the same to one of the most famous names in toilet history.
To this day, Thomas Crapper's name
is proudly stamped on many of his surviving toilets.
This magnificent row of eight was built in 1899.
With beautiful ceramic bowls and flushing cisterns
connected to the sewer system,
these were the very models of modern toilets.
So we all owe a debt of gratitude to this Victorian gentleman, right?
Well, like a lot of history,
the history of toilets is a lot murkier than that.
To get to the bottom of the story, I've come to Westminster.
I'm meeting toilet historian Angela Lee.
Now, tell me, it was Thomas Crapper who invented the toilet, yeah?
No, that's one thing we can be sure of, he didn't invent the toilet.
The first English flushing toilet is more associated with the building
behind us, Westminster Abbey, and the lady who was crowned there.
That's going to be Victoria...
..Elizabeth. Elizabeth I, yes.
Good gracious. So, that's, what, 400 years ago?
Yeah, 1596.
The person who invented it was Sir John Harington.
He was the godson of Elizabeth I.
But only two were ever made.
He had one in his own home, and he had one made for Queen Elizabeth.
Harington's model featured a large tank of water behind the seat.
This was released into the pan and drained via a plug.
But it wasn't a toilet as we know it.
Once ejected, the effluent drained straight down the walls
of wherever it was installed.
There were only two of them?
It didn't catch on? It didn't.
It was really too elaborate and too expensive for people's needs,
when you could use chamber pots
or just throw your waste into the street.
When does the water closet make another appearance?
It comes back really in the mid-18th century when towns are growing,
but particularly it's wealthy people, grand houses,
and they want indoor facilities.
And they don't come much grander than the House of Lords.
Deep inside, there's a rare surviving example...
This way. ..of one of these 18th-century designs.
It was created by inventor Joseph Bramah,
also known for his hydraulics...
..and locks.
Oh, this is posh! This is a Bramah water closet.
So, we lift the lid.
Ah, this is rather glorious.
Can I flush it, can I just give it a try, is that all right?
Yeah. Pull handle.
Ah. Instead of a big whoosh, this is just a little...
Trickle.
I do find it rather remarkable that it's still actually in use.
It is.
Oh, we can see the workings!
Does this...oh, this bit comes up as well.
If we lift that, we should...
It's out of sight, but what makes this special is the S-bend.
The S-bend enables water to be held,
and this prevents the gases, rats,
coming back in. So it's really important
in enabling toilets to come indoors.
Thank goodness for the S-bend, I say!
Despite this innovation, the waste from this toilet,
along with the rest of London's sewage,
was discharged straight into the River Thames.
By Victorian times,
the river was so polluted that it caused a public health crisis...
..and the summer of 1858 was dubbed The Great Stink.
There's a picture in Punch
showing what people felt about the Thames at the time.
There was outbreaks of cholera.
It wasn't just a horrible smell, it was killing people.
It was a catalyst for change,
bringing in legislation really very quickly,
to introduce the building of drains and sewers.
And it also set in train a frantic flurry of companies and individuals
looking at ways of developing a new kind of toilet.
In this frenetic period of innovation,
the toilet as we know it emerged.
Which is where Thomas Crapper got involved.
It's a market that everyone wants to get into,
but it's not Thomas Crapper who's the inventor.
He did, however, really promote and popularise
the idea of a ceramic water closet.
So he was much more of a marketing and sales man?
He was, he puts his name on everything,
and he supplies them and promotes them.
It's a bandwagon. Yes.
"Let's jump quick." Yeah.
Everyone who's anyone is working on toilets.
So it turns out that we have lots of people to thank
every time we use the loo.
The one thing we do know
is that Thomas Crapper may well have been brilliant
at popularising the WC, but he did not invent it.
We're ten hours and 55 minutes into the production process.
Back in the factory, our toilet paper has been fully dried,
and is a huge five-metre-wide sheet travelling at a rate of nearly
40 miles an hour towards the quality control area.
Keith Jones is making sure it's up to scratch.
Keith!
Hey! Hello, Gregg, welcome to the office!
Is that finally the toilet paper?
That's finally your toilet paper.
Wow! What is happening under here?
So, what happens under here is we have our test station,
which is our scanner which is just behind us there,
and that scans the sheet continuously when we're not in here,
and it tells us exactly how much moisture is in the sheet
and how heavy the sheet is.
What happens if the scanner says, "This is not right,
"this paper is too wet?"
Before it goes too far out of tolerance,
it will make those changes back in the system.
So this is spinning how fast?
That's spinning now at 1,150 metres per minute.
Every 23 minutes, we make 21km of paper.
So, nearly every minute is another kilometre of paper?
Not far off, not far off.
With Keith and his quality check scanner happy,
a five-metre-long cardboard tube is locked into position...
..and 17,000 metres of half-a-millimetre thick paper
is wound on to it.
That is one ginormous roll of toilet paper!
Yep. If King Kong used toilet paper, that would be the one he'd use!
Is there a name for that?
We call that a mother reel.
Why? Because that...that is going to give birth
to all the little reels?
That gives birth to thousands of little rolls.
How many toilet rolls out of that?
Well, what we're looking at there, Gregg, is 25,000 toilet rolls.
Ha-ha!
I don't know whether to giggle or just be aghast at that.
As these monster reels roll off the end of the production line,
they are sliced in half...
..producing a pair of 2.5 metre-wide single-ply mother reels,
each weighing 1.2 tonnes.
Paper made, now it's time to create toilet rolls
in the converting area...
..where I'm meeting Alan Hughes.
Are you Alan?
Pleased to meet you, Gregg, how are you doing?
I've been watching this monster being made.
Right, OK. Now, I've come to you because I want to see that made
into proper toilet rolls. No problem.
The toilet rolls we're producing will end up being two-ply -
two sheets stuck together - so we need both of the mother reels.
What we have is a plugging system.
Do you want to have a go? Can I? Yeah.
The first step is to bung the plug in each side of our reels.
It's a slightly bigger version of putting the loo roll on its holder
in your bathroom.
That's it.
Bull's-eye. Yeah.
It's a job that requires pinpoint accuracy.
That's it. Perfect.
Two cranes running on tracks in the ceiling
lift our rolls off the ground...
Quite an effort considering each one weighs the same
as a typical hatchback car.
Everything about this factory is super-sized.
Everything.
Do you, out of interest, when you visit other places...
Yes, is the answer.
Do you look at their toilet paper? Yes.
And I also turn the toilet paper round,
so they have it coming off the front of the toilet roll.
That's how I do it. I have it coming off the front,
not coming off the back. Me, too.
I think that's a touch of class. Yeah.
Our rolls are loaded with the sheet in the correct position,
and head towards the converting machine.
This will be a match made in toilet paper heaven.
Where they actually go into the machine,
that's what we call marrying,
so it's where we actually put the two sheets together.
You actually call it marrying?
Yeah. And they go to their wedding in a carriage!
MUSIC: Here Comes The Bride
These two now, they're going to have their wedding night... Yep.
..they're going to combine together and eventually create loads of
little toilet rolls? Correct, yeah. 25,000.
"Do you, toilet roll, take this other toilet roll?"
It's going to be some honeymoon, mate!
Alan, cheers, mate, I enjoyed that.
Pleased to meet you. Forgive me, but I've got a wedding to go to!
See you later!
Presiding over the ceremony is Tony Gilbody.
Tony? Hi, Gregg.
I want you to show me how we turn that giant toilet roll
into normal toilet rolls. You've come to the right man.
The paper from my two mother reels
is unwound and fed into this machine.
One sheet comes in from the top, the other from the bottom.
Embossing rollers lock the two sheets together,
pressing in a pattern.
This isn't just decorative, it also helps glue the sheets.
My paper is now two-ply.
The glue is in this chamber, here.
It's transferred to this roll.
This roll has tiny little pockets in it which pick up the glue.
It's then picked up by this rubber roll and applied to the paper.
Glue-getter, glue-spreader, pattern-maker.
Simply. Is that it? Yeah.
Brilliant! And it's that glue that helps the two sides of the paper
to stick together? That's right.
It keeps the ply together.
When I watched the fibres when they were wet,
being sprayed on to the mat,
they had the soft ones on top and the strong ones in the middle.
This is what's happening now, right?
You're putting the two bits together so that the soft bits are always
on the outside? That's right.
Now happily married, from here it's till toilet flush do us part.
Across the UK,
we use an astonishing 283,000 miles of this highly-engineered paper
every day.
But, of course, that's not the only thing we put down the loo.
Cherry got the bum deal when it came to following the flush.
I don't know about you, but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about
what happens after I flush.
And I suppose it's because it just works.
But what does go on down here?
I want to find out.
I've come to Brighton, home to around 180,000 domestic toilets.
Everything the residents flush
whizzes along an underground network of pipes.
These feed into the main sewer.
Hi, Sharon.
Hi, Cherry, nice to meet you.
Sharon Holdstock from Southern Water
has a smelly invitation for me.
We're going to take you into a live sewer network,
and you will see where all of Hove and Brighton's sewage goes through.
All right. Here we go!
These sewers, like those in many of our big cities,
were built over 140 years ago.
Let's go.
Your first glimpse.
Definitely noticing that there are very big bits of poo.
So, if you sat on the toilet three and a half miles away,
within 20 minutes, it will be coming down into this system.
These tunnels do more than carry the sewage,
they also begin the process of breaking it down.
Why is it in an egg shape?
Because what happens is, as the flow comes in,
the shape of it at the bottom causes turbulence.
It breaks down the actual sewage.
Is that why I'm not seeing as many whole poos
as I thought there might be?
Yeah.
Brighton's sewers can carry up to 100 million litres of sewage a day.
But it's not just toilet waste that's getting flushed.
What is the weirdest thing you've found?
We quite often find toys.
We've also had false teeth, mobile phones, glasses,
the odd gold ring, the odd finger.
Oh!
So, I mean, so many questions about the finger!
But we'll leave that. Yeah.
So, what happens now?
This sewer network will take a seven-mile trip along
to our treatment works.
40 minutes after it was flushed,
the sewage arrives at the Peacehaven waste water works.
The operations director here is Nick Bowd.
So, I've just seen the sewage making its way to you.
Once it gets here, what happens?
We basically treat that water to a level
that it's safe to be released back to the environment.
So, sewage comes in, and water goes out?
That's exactly right.
Cleaning this polluted water
requires an arsenal of purification techniques -
some highly technical, others less so.
The water passes into 34 of these panels.
So they're like huge sieves?
That is it. These are taking out anything that is larger than 6ml.
Here we have an example.
This is a mixture of fat and rag.
Rag for us is anything that's not toilet paper,
flushable wipes and things like that,
they don't degrade in the sewage system.
That is disgusting!
It is pretty grim.
It should not be put down the loo!
Toilets aren't the only source of waste.
Sinks, showers and surface water all contribute.
The next stage takes out fat, oil, grit and grease.
We have pipework that releases small bubbles.
Those bubbles lower the density of the water,
which means the heavier items like grit will sink to the bottom,
and the lighter items like fat, oil and grease,
will rise to the top.
Clear of debris and grease,
now the poo particles in the water are targeted.
Chemicals force them to clump together into a sludge
which is thickened and dried,
then sold on to farmers as fertiliser.
Now there is one final form of attack.
Basically, behind this brick wall, we have a layer of beads.
It's 3.5 metres deep.
So the water comes, flows through these beads,
and on these beads live our bacteria,
and they help break down any other nasties
that are still in the water.
So, you give the bacteria a lovely home, something to live on.
In return, they nibble away at any unwanted particles.
So then it's ready. It's the end of process.
The water is now clean, but it's not quite clean enough for drinking,
so it's piped a mile and a half offshore,
where it is safely discharged into the English Channel.
There's no doubt about it, water treatment is a dirty job.
But any system that can turn this into this clean water in little less
than an hour is nothing short of astonishing.
We're 11 hours and 30 minutes into the production process.
Our newly-created two-ply toilet paper
heads through the perforation machine,
which cuts it into 12-centimetre, easy-to-rip sections.
This is our paper after it's been perforated.
That's our perforation blade.
So it cuts holes in some of the paper?
That's right. We can have a look.
Great, isn't it, really?
Next, it needs to be wound around a cardboard inner tube
known as a core.
The core maker winds and glues a continuous ribbon of cardboard
around a mould,
producing 33 of these extra-long centres every minute.
Why is that over six feet long?
It needs to be the same width
as the paper which is getting fed through the machine.
So are you going to have to reroll the paper around this?
Exactly. That's the next stage of our process.
You just don't do anything in small sizes, do you?
The cores make their way up a carousel and towards the rewinder,
where 21.6 metres of perforated paper is wound onto each one,
producing an extra-long toilet roll capable of spawning
24 individual rolls.
What are they called? Logs.
That machine just pushed out a log!
Mate, I'm trying really hard to keep this clean!
You're not making it very easy for me!
So, you can see a nice embossed pattern on the paper.
Feel it, what does it feel like? It feels soft.
Feels nice and soft, exactly.
This is the size of the toilet roll I'd have at home?
Exactly, this is 180 sheets.
The diameter is perfect, but the length isn't.
We need our finished toilet rolls to measure 104.5 millimetres.
They are cut down to size at the aptly-named log saw.
Oh, my word!
That's a big, scary machine!
That is cutting through those so fast!
The ones they're cutting through don't look like they're moving.
Two razor-sharp blades on there, and it cuts 230 rolls a minute.
That is spinning really fast!
What you have on the logs is from the process previous,
there's a bit of imperfection on the end.
And we cut those off. They're called the doughnuts.
But I'm not here for doughnuts.
This is what it's all about.
14,000 rolls of toilet paper fly out of the log saw every hour.
There we are.
Toilet rolls marching forward to their final destination.
Look at that!
You'd never think it, looking at the toilet roll on the shelf.
There's the sad little doughnut, right?
Yeah. Why do you cut the end off?
OK, if you just turn it over.
See you've got the imperfect edge?
Yeah? So we just cut the waste off.
There must be something we can do with him?
We don't waste them. We put them back into our system.
I feel sorry for the doughnut.
I think he wants to be with his mates.
The doughnuts head off to be turned back into pulp...
..while our toilet rolls file through to the packing hall.
There's a lot of thought and effort that goes into making these
to make sure that one of the most personal things we do,
wiping our bums, is a comfortable experience.
But just how luxurious could a trip to the toilet get?
Our bathrooms have never been so stylish.
But the technology contained within them is still pretty simple.
While soft-close lids and water efficient flushes have improved
our toilets, the basic design hasn't changed in over a century.
But could all that be about to change?
I want to find out what the toilets of the future will look like.
The Japanese have long been ahead of the game with bathroom tech,
and now they're selling their fancy loos in the UK.
Oh! That's hot!
It's a heated seat. I wasn't expecting that!
Floyd Case works for Toto,
who have sold more than 30 million of these hi-tech toilets
around the world.
The main function is to clean you.
If I can show you.
I'll put this little hat in place.
And you'll see on the remote control we have a number of functions.
If I press the rear button,
a little wand that lives in the seat will come out...
Oh! What is that?!
..and wash you with clean, warm water.
Oh! I don't know if that looks nice!
Dare I say, it's very pleasant.
I can change the position,
because we're all different shapes and sizes.
I can even have what we call an oscillating wash.
Wow! I...that's too much for me.
It's getting rid of a lot of debris.
Absolutely. I mean, this person needs to go and see the doctor.
So you said there's a rear. Does that mean there's a front?
Absolutely. So the front wash is for ladies.
I can even have a pulsate wash.
Stop it!
That is so incredibly...
Hygienic. ..hygienic. Absolutely.
I can then use the drier function to dry myself using warm air.
Get a lovely wash and then a blow-dry.
Absolutely.
This top-of-the-range model costs £10,000.
And, of course...
..there is only one way to see
if this toilet actually does what it says.
Max temperature.
That is warm.
OK, here comes the wand.
CHERRY SQUEALS AND LAUGHS
I've got to admit, I jumped up because it was so alarming.
Well, I can safely say that that's an experience I haven't had before.
I mean, ultimately, loos like this are to make
the toilet-going experience more pleasant.
It's one vision of the future.
While these toilets are water-efficient,
the average loo uses up to ten litres of water with every flush.
And for a third of the world's population,
with no proper sanitation or sewers, that's a real issue.
A team at Cranfield University, with the help of international funding,
has set out to radically rethink loo design
for the first time in 100 years - by removing the need for water.
They're led by Dr Ewan McAdam.
Oh, wow!
So this is our working prototype.
I mean, it looks like a toilet, but not quite as I know it.
That's right. Rather than a water flush, we use a dry flush mechanism.
Every time this seat is pushed down, inside here is a mechanism.
That cleans that bowl.
OK. So rather than using water to transfer the urine and faeces,
we use a swipe to clean the bowl inside,
and that then enables us to use no water at all.
What's so incredible is how simple that solution is.
Yeah. So instead of using tonnes of water to get the waste out
and to clean it, you're simply using gravity and tipping?
That's right, yes.
The seat movement also powers an Archimedes screw
that separates solid waste from liquid.
They are working on a tiny combustor
which will sit at the back of the unit and burn up the poo.
They've already devised a way to get clean water from the urine,
using a special membrane.
So these membranes are hydrophobic.
So what that means is, they repel water, and instead
the only thing that's allowed to pass through that membrane
is water as a vapour.
So what you can see here, as a result of that separation,
is nice, clear water.
It's safe to discharge into the environment and it would be safe
for re-use.
A more refined prototype is currently being worked on.
It should be ready for use in 18 months' time.
A very different vision of what the toilet of the future looks like.
Our toilet rolls have been trimmed
to size and are heading to the packing hall
via 155 metres of computer-controlled conveyors.
They're wrapped and heat sealed into packs of nine,
then loaded onto pallets.
Now they head to the 5,000 square metre distribution area.
After 11 hours and 31 minutes
of soaking, drying, unrolling and rerolling,
they are about to make their way out of the factory.
Tony Slevin is overseeing the operation.
Are you in charge of all of this, Tony?
Yeah, this is the distribution area.
I don't suppose you know, do you,
how many individual rolls are there on that lorry?
Well, on the pallet is 1,080 rolls.
We have 48 pallets on the trailer.
Which works out round about 52,000 rolls.
52,000 rolls.
And we use individually about 100 a year? Yeah.
So that lorry would last me 500 years?
Yeah. Last you around about 500 years.
Even if I ate curry and prunes everyday?
If that's your choice, yeah!
There is no seasonal peak for you, is there?
You don't sell more around Easter.
No. The same, constant, all year round.
Just constant supply, day in, day out. Yeah.
That's the very last pallet going on, right?
Yeah, they're the last pallets going on. Brilliant. Do you know what?
If I hadn't have seen that process with my own eyes,
I don't think I'd have ever have believed it.
Who'd have imagined that anything so simple could be so complicated?
It's a long way from the Swedish forest!
Every day, 16 lorries ship loo roll out of here and send it off
around the UK.
The biggest users are in the north-east,
with London and the East of England hot on their heels.
I am genuinely surprised that it takes this much big,
heavy industrial machinery
to make something as light and fluffy as toilet roll.
But then I suppose they have to make so much of it.
Because if there is one item,
no matter how mundane we consider it to be,
that we would never, ever want to run out of, then it's this.
Next time...
That's a sausage superhighway!
..I'm in a North Yorkshire sausage factory...
Yeah!
I love the sudden waterfall of sausage meat.
..getting some hands-on experience.
Pressing it here, right? Yeah, that's correct.
Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!
And Cherry learns how to get the best from your banger.
Wow. Slow and painful!