This morning we passed a house that had been TPed. I asked my companion if their house have ever been TPed, as ours never had (kids not into sports.) She said their house had been TPed a number of times, and told me about the story she had had to tell her husband to stop telling.
Apparently when their house was TPed, when he was cleaning up the TP, if he came across a long piece that was clean and dry, he would roll it up and keep it for - ahem - the family’s personal use.
Such a thing had never occurred to me. And, at first I was all But on reflection, it, does seem a waste to just toss all that perfectly good TP…
My wife won’t use TP that’s been removed from the roll for any other reason. In my opinion, what I’m going to do with it is most certainly going to be worse than what it’s already experienced, and likewise I doubt wherever it’s been was dirtier than where it’s going. That said, attempting to recycle TP from outdoors is a bit much.
My neighbor’s house got TP’ed a couple weeks ago. (Seems to be a high school rite-of-passage when someone makes the cut for one of the sports teams.) I was out picking up stray TP that had blown into our yard when I noticed a nearly full roll on our driveway. So yeah I definitely picked that one up and saved it.
I remember years ago a friend in college talking about a friend of his from high school, whose dad allegedly had a habit of saving “slightly used” toilet paper for later use. Let’s say my college buddy discovered this the hard way.
There are other, minor uses for TP that might be workable for repurposed, ‘gently used’ sheets, such as blowing your nose, minor cleaning, and such, that I could justify using if I was for some weird reason like the OP, having to gather it up anyway… but I really wouldn’t bother 99.9% of the time, just not enough savings to justify the effort of carefully checking and putting it away for at most a few cents worth of profit.
The closest I do is periodically save some TP for nose blowing when one of my cats decides to attack a roll of TP and gets his claws through a half dozen layers. With the tears, I wouldn’t want to wad and wipe, but for a sinus cleaning? Meh. And it’s already right there, so I’m not doing any extra work I wouldn’t have already had to do.
When I was that age, I was extremely environmentally correct (we were called hippies back then) so would have reused what I could have. Due to my tree-hugger mindset, I never TP’d anyone’s house. I popcorned them instead.
I would pop big bags of popcorn, no butter or salt and sneak over in the dead of the night feeling smug knowing that the birds would clean everything up by the next evening.
Nowadays? Not so much, I’d just pay someone to clean up the mess and forget about it.
When my big brother was a freshman at Purdue U, he told me the dorm restrooms would be stripped of TP the day of a home basketball game. The kids loved to throw them at the game, festooning the rafters with paper.
But on reflection, it, does seem a waste to just toss all that perfectly good TP…