Don’t rush to flush

Toilet paper is a marvellous invention — and it was a marvellous invention even before the current pandemic made it so popular that, for a while, you couldn’t even find it on store shelves.

While different brands stress everything from absorbency to cleanliness to “enjoying the go,” the fundamentals are simple. To quote BBC Science Focus: “Toilet paper is made from short cellulose fibres, which is why it tears so easily. In water, those fibres quickly come untangled and form a thin sludge that’s easily carried by the water flow in the sewage system. By the time it reaches the sewage treatment plant, most of the toilet paper has completely disintegrated…”

Why is this important? Because of another pandemic issue.

Cities across the country have had to issue advice to residents who are either dealing with a shortage of toilet paper or who, in taking extra sanitizing precautions, have turned to a more modern invention — the “flushable” disinfecting wipe.

Some flushable wipes are actually that: designed to break up in ways similar to toilet paper. Many, though, are actually made of sheets of plastic fibres; still others say they will break up, but when tested, don’t.

For those, “flushable” merely means that you can drop them into the toilet bowl, press the little lever on the side of the tank and said wipe will magically disappear around the bend in the bottom of bowl and into a mysterious subterranean land. They have been flushed, ergo, “flushable.” Somewhere, an enterprising label-designer won the admiration of an entire wipe industry for coming up with that deceptive moniker.

Why deceptive?

Well, people have accidently found out that rings that slip off their fingers are flushable; enterprising toddlers have found that Lego blocks, small toy cars and even small stuffed animals could carry the same labelling.

The problem isn’t with the flushing, it’s what comes next.

Steel girders are the core of giant, unshiftable buildings. “Flushable” wipes are the strata that bind together massive sewer-blocking blobs known as “fatbergs.” Wet wipes twist and bind together, flushed grease and kitchen fats bind to mesh, building a dastardly kind of giant mass you might be tempted to label as “poopier mâché.” In extreme instances, the blobs can weigh tonnes and have to be cut apart and removed after entire sewer systems are blocked.

But fatbergs are only the most spectacular manifestation of the problem. They can block your home sewer piping, the piping on your street, main lines further on down the road. (A real problem, even if you’re among the ilk that believes that, once something’s off your property, it’s someone else’s problem.)

Even if they make it to the treatment plant, the wipes can clog the system there as well.

The solution? It’s simple. Don’t.