What Not to Flush: The Wipes Problem

A wipe labelled flushable will go down the toilet. So will a tea towel. Going down is not the test.

The test is what happens next, and it comes down to one property: dispersibility. How quickly does it come apart in water?

Toilet paper is engineered to fail. That is its whole design brief — hold together when dry, fall apart within seconds of getting wet. It is why it feels flimsy.

A wipe is engineered to do the opposite. It has to stay in one piece while wet, because a wipe that disintegrated in your hand would be useless. That strength usually comes from plastic fibres, and it does not go away in a drain.

So the wipe travels down the toilet, into the branch, out to the main line, and stays exactly as intact as it was. Then it meets the first thing that can catch it — a root, a joint, a rough patch of scale — and stops.

The next one stops against it.

The word "flushable" is not doing what you think

There is no test a manufacturer has to pass to print it. It means the product fits through a toilet, which is a claim about plumbing geometry, not about what happens forty feet down the line.

This is not a small effect at the margins. Wipes are the most common thing we pull out of a blocked toilet and main line, and it is not close. Baby wipes, cleaning wipes, makeup wipes, and the ones sold specifically as flushable — all of them.

Everything else that should not go down a toilet

The rule is simple: toilet paper, and nothing else.

• Paper towels and tissues. Made to stay strong when wet. Same problem as wipes.
• Sanitary products and nappies. Designed to absorb and expand. They do that in the pipe.
• Cotton buds and dental floss. Small, but they do not break down, and floss is very good at knitting other debris into a mass.
• Hair. From a brush, not from washing. Binds with everything.
• Cat litter, including the clumping kind sold as flushable. It clumps. That is what it is for.
• Medication. Does not block anything, but it goes to the treatment plant and then into the river. Most pharmacies take it back.

The kitchen is a separate problem

Toilets block from objects. Kitchen sinks block from grease, and it is worth understanding why, because it is the most preventable blockage there is.

Fat goes down warm and liquid. It cools in the pipe. It sticks to the wall. The next lot sticks to that. After a year the pipe is noticeably narrower; after five it is a problem.

A garbage disposal does not help. It makes particles smaller, and smaller particles bind into grease more readily, not less. The disposal protects the drain from objects, not from fat.

Coffee grounds, rice, pasta and flour all accelerate it — they swell, or they bind, or both.

The one habit that prevents most of this: pour cooking fat into a jar or an empty tin, let it set, bin it. That is the whole technique.

What to do about a slow drain before it becomes a blocked one

• Put a strainer on every basin, tub and shower. They cost very little and catch nearly all the hair.
• Run hot water down the kitchen sink after washing up. Boiling water is more effective on grease than any chemical drain cleaner, and it costs nothing.
• Deal with slow drains when they are slow. A slow drain becomes a blocked drain, and it picks its moment.

Why we would rather you did not use drain cleaner

It is ineffective against the two things that actually cause most blockages — grease and hair — and it damages older cast iron and rubber seals.

When it fails, it leaves a trap full of standing caustic liquid for whoever opens it up. Which is us.

If it has already gone down

For a single blocked fixture, toilet and sink drain cleaning is a contained job, usually one visit.

If more than one fixture is affected at once, it is not the fixture — it is the main line they share, and the wipes have collected somewhere further out.

Call (201) 315-6655, day or night, any day of the week.

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