9 Things Your Plumber Probably Wishes You Hadn’t Flushed

Your toilet is a straw, not a stomach.

It moves three things: pee, poop, and toilet paper. That is the entire guest list.

Everything else takes a slow, humiliating tour of your pipes before meeting a stranger holding a wrench.

That stranger is your plumber, and he has seen things that would make a coroner take a personal day.

Wipes by themselves add about $441 million a year in operating costs at American clean water utilities, which is a spectacular amount of money to spend on other people’s laziness.

The 9 things your plumber probably wishes you hadn’t flushed are not exotic. They are sitting in your bathroom right now, radiating innocence.

The 9 things your plumber probably wishes you hadn’t flushed

Nine items cause most of the damage, and they share one talent: refusing to fall apart in water.

• Dental floss, which knits everything else together into one confident lump.
• “Flushable” wipes, the most successful lie in the cleaning aisle.
• Cotton swabs and contact lenses, small enough to walk straight past security at the treatment plant.
• Condoms.
• Tampons and pads, engineered to absorb water and heartbreakingly good at their job.
• Cat litter, plus the parasite that hitched a ride in it.
• Cooking grease.
• Old pills, most of them anyway.
• Your goldfish, who is not dead, and who is about to become a problem for an entire lake.

Toilet paper is the only paper product engineered to give up immediately.

1. Dental floss

Floss is waxed nylon, and nylon has never dissolved in anything, including seawater, hot coffee, or the inside of your house.

One strand is nothing. Two hundred strands are a hammock.

That hammock catches hair, then a wipe, then a bottle cap, and then it invites the entire neighborhood over for an extended stay.

Septic owners get a bonus prize, because floss wraps itself around a pump impeller and quietly chokes the motor to death over several expensive and entirely preventable months.

2. “Flushable” wipes

Researchers at Ryerson University ran 101 single-use products through a model of a home’s plumbing, and not one of them passed.

Twenty-three of those products were labeled flushable by the manufacturer. Two managed to partly fall apart. The rest came out of a thirty-minute slosh test looking ready for a second shift.

Zero. The label is decorative.

A wipe leaves your house intact, finds some grease, and starts recruiting. The Whitechapel fatberg hit 130 tonnes and stretched 250 metres under east London before anyone noticed it.

Crews spent weeks hacking at it with shovels and high-pressure hoses.

The bill for that kind of cleanup never lands on the wipe company. It lands on the sewer bill of every house on the block, including the ones that only flush paper.

Put the wipe in the trash. The wastewater industry has been begging for this for over a decade while the packaging cheerfully insists otherwise.

That word should be illegal on packaging.

Calling a wipe flushable because it fits through the hole is like calling a raccoon a house pet because it fits through the door.

3. Cotton swabs and contact lenses

Plastic cotton bud stems make up 5 to 10 percent of marine debris in European seas, because they are skinny enough to slide through the screens at a treatment plant.

They wash up on beaches standing upright in the sand, tiny flags claiming the shore in the name of your ear canal.

Contact lenses run the same play.

Arizona State researchers found that 15 to 20 percent of wearers rinse their lenses down the sink or toilet, which adds up to billions of tiny plastic domes a year.

Screens at a treatment plant are built to stop the big stuff, so the small stuff is what sails through to the ocean. Size is the whole problem, and everybody assumes the opposite.

Nobody has ever blocked a sewer with one Q-tip. That is exactly what the sewer wants you to believe.

4. Condoms

Latex is forever.

Your local sewer district would like you to wrap it in toilet paper and bin it, which is also what your roommate would like, though for entirely different reasons.

A flushed condom fills with water and inflates as it travels, which is the proudest it has ever looked.

Then it snags on a rough joint and starts collecting hair, grease, floss, and whatever else drifts by that week.

The clog it builds is a scrapbook of every Saturday night you thought you got away with, assembled by a stranger who will not make eye contact.

5. Tampons and pads

In the UK alone, 2.5 million tampons are flushed every single day, along with 1.4 million pads, running water companies about £100 million a year in blockages.

These things are engineered to absorb liquid and hold onto it under pressure. A sewer is a wet place. You see the design conflict.

Most people flushing them already know better. A survey by phs Group found a quarter of recent flushers did it because the bin felt more embarrassing than the alternative.

Shame is a terrible plumber.

So the fix is not another scolding list of forbidden items. The fix is a lidded bin inside the stall, within arm’s reach, so nobody has to make that call while somebody waits outside.

6. Cat litter

Cat feces can carry Toxoplasma gondii, and those eggs shrug off normal wastewater treatment before washing out to sea and killing otters.

Your cat is running a biological weapons program out of a plastic tray.

Flushing the evidence makes you the getaway driver.

Clumping litter is also built to turn liquid into rock on contact, which is a fantastic product feature and a catastrophic thing to introduce to a narrow pipe.

“Flushable” litter works beautifully in any toilet with the water pressure of a municipal fire hose. Yours does not have that.

7. Cooking grease

Grease lies.

It goes down warm and innocent, then cools into a waxy sleeve that lines your pipe like arterial plaque.

The EPA reports that grease from homes, restaurants, and industry is the most common cause of sewer blockages, at 47 percent.

Grease is the mortar and wipes are the bricks.

The fatberg under your street is a group project, built by your bacon pan and your neighbor’s wipe habit, and neither of you gets to blame the other.

Pour it into a can, let it harden, throw the can away, and feel smug for the rest of the evening.

8. Old pills

USGS scientists sampled 444 small streams and detected nicotine at 70 percent of sites, with two or more pharmaceuticals showing up in nearly every stream near a city.

The fish are on your antidepressants and they are still not happy.

The standard advice is to never flush medication.

The FDA disagrees and publishes a flush list of drugs, including fentanyl patches and oxycodone, that belong in the toilet when no take-back program is close by.

One patch fished out of the trash can kill a toddler or a dog, so the fish lose that argument on points.

Everything else goes to a pharmacy kiosk, or into a bag of coffee grounds in the trash, or anywhere except the water your neighbors are about to drink.

9. The goldfish

Burial at sea by porcelain is a beloved family tradition and a fantastic way to start a monster movie.

Flushed fish and dumped fish end up in the same waterways, and they do not stay bite-sized. Goldfish in the wild reach 19 inches and nine pounds.

University of Toledo researchers added goldfish to miniature lakes and watched water quality collapse.

Kevin does not die. Kevin reaches a canal, bulks up, and starts rearranging the lake bottom like a landlord who just inherited the building.

Wrap him in a paper towel, bury him by the fence, say something kind. Do not hand him a canal and a personality.

Buy the bin

A lidded bin within arm’s reach of the toilet fixes eight of these nine problems.

The ninth one is grease, and grease takes a coffee can.

Somewhere out there a plumber is staring at his phone, praying it stays quiet, and a twelve-dollar bin is the only thing standing between him and your scrapbook.