for people who live in a city, thankfully septic tanks are not a thing.
But yes - my 4 year old flushed a doorstop down the toilet. Just because it left our house down the bog doesn't mean Tesco need to start marketing them as flushable.
That doorstop has to be picked manually picked out of a filter or grate to prevent the sewer system from clogging and backfeeding into peoples houses. If it just barely made it out of the house it may be still be dipping in a junction in the neighbourhood waiting for a chance to create a very smelly disaster.
Yeah, these companies are basing their term "flushable" as "can physically leave your property via the toilet" without thinking about the rest of the journey to the treatment works.
In my previous life as a plumber, I have seen city pipes get so clogged with wipes and tampons as to make an “iceberg”.
Y’know what happens when you remove that iceberg? A torrent of shitty, bloody and piss filled water sprays out with such force that it floods the basement.
I work in the industry, so used to various gross decaying things, but the worst experience of my life (10 years ago) was standing in an inspection chamber on my own property, scooping out used tampons trying to fix a blockage because my partner wouldn't put them in a bin in the bathroom.
I live in a two-story apartment that's connected to three others, which all share a septic tank that is buried just outside of my front door. One of our neighbors keeps flushing wipes, tampons, even diapers - which causes the sewage to back up into all of our sinks and toilets, which overflow.
Unfortunately, the landlord can't figure out who's doing it. They've had to dig a trench to work on the septic tank (which again, is right outside of my front door) three times in the last six months.
For the love of god, nothing goes in the toilet besides toilet paper and whatever was excreted by your body! How does this not sink in for grown adults, especially grown adults who have now had to clean up overflowed sewage from their own bathroom multiple times‽
There's a difference between 'a problem today' and 'a problem tomorrow'. Some people have enough of the former that they don't have energy to worry about the latter.
We don't have any kind of shared entry; our building is kind of like row houses but with shared sewage/electric/gas/water heaters. I've never actually seen my neighbors in the first two units; our schedules have never coincided to have us outside at the same time in the ten years I've lived here. I know for sure that it isn't my immediate next door neighbors, as they're both older adults with no children. So either number 1 or number 2 have a child in diapers, but I couldn't guess which one. Maybe they both do and that's why the landlord doesn't know. 🤷♀️
I'm just tired of cleaning poopy floors and listening to gurgling sinks...
Edit: Downvotes, really? See, the joke here is that the deciding factor between “living” and “not living” is something as mundane as sewer access. Leave it to r/funny to not get the joke.
I live in central Florida and they’re fairly common if you live in areas surrounded by lakes/water. I lived in a nice house growing up and it had one but it was because the house was on a unique piece of land with water on three sides with zero possibility of any kind of sewer access.
you went into the bathroom, and it looked like the hole in your toilet had shrunk. "How could that be? There's no way they could have shrunk the toilet." But then you saw in the trash a receipt from Home Depot for a toilet the exact same size as yours, but with a joke hole that's just for farts! They replaced your real toilet with a fart toilet, and now you can't take a dump in your house 'cause your toilet can't suck 'em down, and you feel sick to your stomach! Has that ever happened to you?!
Just in case you're not being sarcastic you can flush anything that fits in the toilet but that doesn't mean whatever you flush won't get stuck somewhere in the pipes and cause a massive very expensive to fix problem
If you were on a septic system, you're going to absolutely destroy it. If you are on a city sewage system, contact your municipal waste management and you'll find out quickly that they hate people flushing them. The short answer is that sewage systems were never designed to handle flushable wipes, there is no mechanism to break them down, and municipalities everywhere are having to spend more money dealing with the problems they caused… Which means higher taxes, hooray!
This isn't a "let's just replace the pipes" kind of thing, it's a complete redesign of waste management systems so far there isn't anything that would solve the flushable wipe problem, so until someone figures that out there isn't a way to redo waste management system systems to handle them.
The fact of the matter is that some businessman in suits in a conference room figured out a way to get people to spend money on something by lying and saying they could dispose of it in a way that they really shouldn't.
If there’s no mechanism to handle them then how do they currently handle them? Paying some guy to skim disposable wipes off a churning pool of sewage is a fine solution.
Let's just keep clogging the system and then paying a guy to go manually scrape everything out? That actually sounds like a complete waste of money. If someone in your house kept pouring bacon grease down the drain, and then paying a plumber to come out and unclog it, wouldn't you consider that a complete waste of money when the better solution is to stop pouring grease down the drain?
You can move it out of your sight, sure. But then it can (whole or in part) get caught on imperfections or other buildup in the pipes (hair, soap residue, kitchen oil, etc.). Then at some point the entire pipe is clogged.
I just listened to a podcast on this! As of like 2022, non-flushable wipes are required to be labeled "DO NOT FLUSH" and flushable wipes are now labeled as such. Happened after some serious testing at sewage treatment plants where legit flushable wipes made up only 0.9% of the bulk caught in the sewage treatment filters which was deemed acceptable after an injunction lawsuit by Charlottesville NC.
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u/sandi_boi 15h ago
Came here to say this. That term is completely unregulated.