Another Reminder To Not Flush Wipes Down The Toilet
We know toilet paper has been a hot commodity and, at times, hard to find this year. While there are other replacements, it's always good to remember not all are flushable.
If you live in a house with women, you know the rule(s) about flushing feminine products and that would be...DON'T. However, there are items that may look like toilet paper but definitely do not break down the same and those would be wipes.
The different variations of wipes are probably pretty endless but the most common include makeup-removing wipes, baby wipes and those previously-mentioned not-flushable wipes advertised as "flushable."
Not only can they cause backups in your home plumbing systems, but major spills of waste like what just happened in Northern Michigan.
As MLive reported, citing the Associated Press and the Traverse City Record-Eagle, 10,000 gallons of human waste spilled from a manhole in Beulah recently and who is to blame but...wipes!
So how does this happen?
Either on a small scale, like your home septic system, or on a larger scale like an entire town wipes do not break down like traditional toilet paper and can actually, according to MLive, clog systems as a mass called a "fatberg."
Macomb County stands as an example in this disgusting phenom: "In May, officials in Macomb County said they’re removing 4,000 pounds of wipes a week at just one of the pump stations," said MLive.
We can only assume they were trying to remove and avoid a fatberg like the one the county had back in 2018 that MLive says was "100-feet long, 11-feet wide and 6-feet tall. [And] cost roughly $100,000 to remove."
The lesson here: don't flush anything but toilet paper down your toilets unless you want your home or your town could end up in a disgusting situation that nobody wants to deal with. "Fatberg" is more than just a mean nickname kids make up on the playground.
While everyone else was panic-buying toilet paper, what else were they stocking up on for "the great quarantine of 2020"? Let's take a look: