Bring-Your-Own to Save Millions for Newark, Texas A&M

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The City of Newark, N.J., USA, is taking desperate steps to close a $70 million budget deficit, including cutting toilet paper from its 2010 budget. Not buying toilet paper for city offices is one of several belt-tightening actions recently implemented by Mayor Cory Booker, which also include cutting the city’s work week to four days, scrapping holiday decorations, and closing city pools. These measures, most of which took affect at the beginning of this month, will reportedly save the City of Newark between $10 million and $15 million. The mayor noted that meeting the revenue shortfall by budget cuts is preferable to increasing property taxes.

In a similar move that also began at the first of this month, Texas A&M University also cut toilet paper from its dormitories to help close a $60 million campus-wide deficit gap. Cutting dormitory toiler paper will save the university an estimated $82,000/yr. Coinciding with the removal of toilet paper from dormitory bathrooms, campus stores began stocking the essential product.

The change affects about 6,000 of the university’s 10,000 students who live on campus, meaning that the university will be saving about $13 per student resident. Recent studies show that, on the average, people in the U.S. use about $50 worth of toilet paper annually.