Toilet Papering Texas

April 11, 2008 – 9:30 pm

I have sitting next to me a roll of Kirkland Embossed Bath Tissue from Costco. You know, the kind of toilet paper you pick up in a pack bigger than a small child. With so much toilet paper, you could probably cover something pretty big. Maybe Texas?

So, for today's Rough Equivalents, I'm going to find out how much toilet paper it takes to cover Texas, both in rolls and in soft two-ply sheets.

To get started, Costco has been very kind and printed dimensions on its packaging: 53.1 square feet per roll, 425 eighteen square inch squares per roll. So the rough equivalent of a 36-roll pack would be the floor space in a 1900 square foot house. If your house or apartment is 1900 square feet or less, you could cover every square inch of floor with toilet paper. If you have a small apartment, you might be able to do your ceilings too.

But how many rolls (and squares) of toilet paper does it take to be the Rough Equivalent of the great state of Texas?

The area of the state of Texas is 268,580.821 square miles. That's land and water area. I originally thought to leave out the water area because the toilet paper would get soggy, but this is a thought experiment. We're not really going to toilet paper the whole state... are we?

To get the square feet in the state of Texas, we multiply 268,580.821 square miles times 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile for approximately 7,487,603,560,166.4 square feet. That means the Rough Equivalent of the state of Texas is 141,009,483,242.3 rolls of toilet paper. In other words, it would take approximately 59.93 trillion squares of toilet paper to completely cover Texas.

But perhaps we can think smaller. Here are some cities and their Rough Equivalents in rolls and squares of Costco toilet paper.

• Seattle, Washington: 74,837,795.49 rolls, 31,806,063,084 squares.
• New York City, New York: 246,167,091 rolls, 104,621,013,686 squares.
• Chicago, Illinois: 122,854,764.1 rolls, 52,213,274,754 squares.
• Los Angeles, California: 261,611,383 rolls, 111,184,837,930 squares.
• Miami, Florida: 29,015,644 rolls, 12,331,648,897 squares.

What areas can you determine a Rough Equivalent for in rolls or squares of toilet paper?