If you are worried about this you might want to consider whether you have a healthy degree of concern about hygiene and bacteria. It could be worth speaking with a therapist.
I am not personally turned off by the hygiene of toilet paper rolls, but I think any rational adult's Overton Window should accommodate those who are. Your condescension is grossly unwarranted.
You don't have to be Adrian Monk to recognize that toilets are unsanitary.
I'm not sure where you got condescension from - I was going for genuine concern. Being irrationality concerned about hygiene is a warning sign for conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder.
Eh, it got a chuckle and eye roll outta me so I didn't mind.
And fwiw, I don't really care either wherever people use them for whatever they want, I am just still confused why people would want to use paper (sourced from leftover toilet utensils), which is notorious for being basically un-cleanable... as food storage, but to each their own.
I'm surprised how many people hate me for such (imo) mellow statement though
I don't really think anyone other than OCD/germaphobes thinks about toilet paper rolls in that way and it's certainly not "notorious". I'm pretty sure the general sentiment is that it's a perfectly benign material, often given to kids to play and craft with.
The same thing happened with that episode of mythbusters about the toilet ploom from flushing. A bunch of OCD/germaphobes lost their minds and have not stopped thinking about it since. Meanwhile the rest of society gave a collective shrug and couldn't even be bothered to move their toothbrush brush to another room or close the toilet lid while flushing.
This isn't a food storage thing, but I think I see where you got that idea from the photos in the link. He's showing the types of paperboard that work with his system. Old cereal boxes, coffee filter boxes, etc.
IIUC this is also true of most 3D-print materials. You should not be using Gridfinity to store food! This is also why you usually shouldn't 3D print a dildo.
This would be true even if the materials were food safe to be honest, I don't see how you can keep something like this clean.
It's for storing stuff like capacitors and screws and electrical tape.
context: 3D-print material like PLA is food safe, but due to the many edges and lines between the print layers it is basically impossible to clean to a food safe degree.
While theoretically you can get certified food-safe blend of PLA, the rest of the extrusion path must also be food-safe... I personally am not fond of eating hot degraded PTFE... Or the trace remains of charred ASA/ABS I printed last week through the same nozzle... Or in fact any of the various coatings of the heated bed or leftover trace amounts of previous prints...
It's just a black hole that I choose not to get into by not printing stuff that's expected to be in contact with food.
> I personally am not fond of eating hot degraded PTFE
If this is a problem, you should buy a new printer that actually keeps the filament conduits away from the hotend. This is a health hazard regardless of food safety - decomposed PTFE is nasty stuff to breathe in.
> Or the trace remains of charred ASA/ABS I printed last week through the same nozzle...
Fair enough, but I would also say that you should be purging old filament anyways before starting a new one. My slicer does this by default.
> Or in fact any of the various coatings of the heated bed or leftover trace amounts of previous prints...
These days, heated beds are covered in PEI. That's food-safe too.
I think your take is a little panicky and not supported by the evidence. It is perfectly fine to print single-use food stuff out of PLA, especially if you just have a roll or two of the pure (undyed) stuff around. You're much more likely to get sick from the food itself than the plastic it touched for a little while, and PLA is relatively biodegradable compared to most other plastic foodware.
> If this is a problem, you should buy a new printer that actually keeps the filament conduits away from the hotend
The filament is still in contact with the PTFE tube, the PTFE tube is also hand-cut by me and in motion with the head so it undergoes wear. Even when you get an all-metal hotend there are ways of contamination by PTFE passing through the hot-end and degrading into harmful chemicals.
> purging old filament anyways before starting a new one. My slicer does this by default.
I do purge and cold-pull. While this removes the bulk of the old filament it does not remove all trace amounts of it.
> These days, heated beds are covered in PEI. That's food-safe too.
It is food-safe only if it was produced in a food-safe manner and was kept food safe afterwards, including no contact with pollutants.
Since you mention evidence, I have no way of proving that anything I produce is food-safe. Literally not anything in my extrusion path is certified food-safe, let alone I have equipment to test.
The fact of the matter is that glass, ceramic, and stainless steel has replaced any vessels that are in contact with food at home, and I don't intend to look back on that, and I am in fact looking to replace anything in regular contact with human skin with non-synthetic/non-plastic alternatives -- this includes clothes, bed sheets and others.
While there is the hacking mindset, people also need to be responsible, and my red lines on that is making stuff with a safety aspect to it. Food safety is safety as much as fire and electrical safety in my book.
Also lead from brass nozzles. I think the risks are overblown, but recommending anything that is not recognized as food-safe for use with food is a liability, better safe than sorry, as they say.
There are food safe coatings though, these deal with the problem by making your 3D print not in contact with food.
The main solution I've heard is to just encapsulate the whole thing in foodsafe epoxy. Then it doesn't matter as much what the inner material in so long as you monitor for damage.
Yeah there are a couple that claim to be like this [0] one, and there are FDA standards to follow for that claim. I wouldn't use one on a cutting board or anything that gets scraped or cut on and you need to let it cure waaaay longer than normal but yeah there are options out there.
I think the hygiene issue is somewhat exaggerated. Early printing often didn't prioritize properly dried filament so the output often bubbled and had many pockmarks and imperfections where bacteria could grow. If you look at modern prints they are quite smooth and consistent.
Even so, if you want to be perfectly safe then apply a coat of polyurethane varnish and let it fully cure. That will seal any holes or voids where bacteria might grow, insulated from cleaning solutions.
Because some of us have like 200 cables, and toilet paper rolls is a cheap but effective way of getting some control over these :) And besides, I'm sure that my fingers and feet are more dirty when I touch/move any of the cables, than the toilet paper rolls that spent a couple of days in a bathroom.
I'm not sure if you're trying to say that's a lot or little? But yeah, each roll might survive 3-4 days at most I'd guess, but honestly can't say I've ever measured. We're two people (me and my wife) in the household fwiw.
It las us (household of two also) at least a week. I've found out in the past that I used way too much out of habit. Also for some reason triple ply needs less paper
Feels like a lot. Even 3-4 days does. I'm not judging though!
In my household with 3 adults, we go through maybe a roll every 2 weeks or so. It's almost exclusively used for number 2 business though, so maybe that accounts for some of that difference.
Or, we just use very different types of paper, and yours require more of it for the same effect. :)
might i suggest purchasing a bidet. you can get one for less than $50 on amazon and it will help you dramatically cut down on toilet paper. it also makes you feel so much cleaner. my two cents
> might i suggest purchasing a bidet. you can get one for less than $50 on amazon and it will help you dramatically cut down on toilet paper
You may suggest whatever you want :) We do have an installed bidet in our main bathroom, as most houses where I live has those. Tried it, didn't like it, will proceed with using paper as currently it doesn't have many drawbacks and doesn't leave me feeling "more dirty" afterwards than using water would.
You mean like a phone, that you later stick up to your face? I’m sure someone will chime in with how they “never use their phone in the bathroom”, which no one will believe.
I worry about the digestive health of people who use phones in the bathroom. I go in there for a specific job, which I focus on until completion. I never get bored enough to start looking for other things to do.
