We have a person that comes in and cleans my office. The quote for the cleaning includes supplies such as toilet paper. During my afternoon sabbatical, I started to wonder, “How does one quote a contract for the supply of toilet paper (TP). “
I figured that finding the answer to this might make for an interesting afternoon google. I had visions of someone calculating DPD (Dumps per day) or PPD (Paper per dump) to figure out how many rolls of paper to supply an office. This whole story would make a humorous, if slightly tasteless, blog entry.
Google turned up several results that had combined paper usage. I found out that toilet paper seems to be quite the issue for the environmental lobby. However, the most interesting one I found was here. This guy came up with an equation that you can use to calculate enough TP to stockpile for life.
(number of days life expectrancy/71.48)= rolls to stockpile/person
I only need to calculate a year so I used 365 for the number of days. Based on this formula and the 20 people in my office, we should need 102.126 roles of TP for the year or about 51 dollars worth of TP.
I feel so much more relieved now that I have worked it out.
Posted by srivinus at February 4, 2004 02:28 PMGiven that formula, one roll should last a single person about 71 days. By extention, it should last 4 people 18 days (I'm rounding up). There is no *way* that a single roll of TP is going to last my family 18 days.
A quick scan of the article shows that the author stipulates that 71 *frugal* people per day would use a single roll. Let's face it... who is frugal with TP? I think this estimate is *far* too conservative.
However, another consideration - your staff only spends about half their waking hours at work, so not all of their TP usage will be billable to your TP supply. Also, you based your annual figure on 365 days per year... is your office open weekends? Fully staffed?
With three bathrooms in my house, plus various family mmembers using facilities outside the home, I'd be hard pressed to come up with empirical numbers, but my guess is that the 71.48 in your equation should be about 20.
Posted by: Jason Clark at February 4, 2004 04:39 PMWell I had to "Fudge" the numbers a little bit.
Posted by: srivinus at February 4, 2004 09:31 PM