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Why I Regret My New Toilet Seat

By jjacquet on October 1, 2008.

I recently bought a new wooden toilet seat at Target for five dollars. Five dollars! It wasn't even on sale and I thought to myself, "What a steal!" I should have known that was probably, literally the case. My toilet seat was probably illegally logged in Russia. In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian (who also wrote the great profile of Paul Watson) writes about the illegal logging market. The article is not quite online yet, but check out this short video where he discusses how a tree illegally logged from halfway around the world becomes a toilet seat at your local Wal-Mart (or Target, I'm sure).

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Oh, come on. How can you put toilets and illegal logging in the same post.

I'm not even sure what illegal logging is - forgetting to flush afterwards?

I didn't even know what some of our toilet seats were made of. This site says they are made of either plastic -- easy to identify -- or wood flour and melamine, combined at high temperatures to create a kind of molded wood:
www.madehow.com/Volume-5/Toilet.html
The wood flour comes from sawdust and there is plenty of sawdust, so it is good that it gets used.
I've never seen a real wood toilet seat made of pieces of wood instead of the above "molded wood."
This article talks about sawdust and its uses:
www.agmrc.org/agmrc/commodity/biomass/sawdustshavingswoodwaste/sawdustp…
Why is it cheaper to get wood from Russia than to use recycled sawdust here at home?