Among the best ways to protect the plumbing system in your Gilbert, AZ home is limiting what you flush. Unfortunately, many popular and often essential products are marketed as being flushable even though they’re not. These include “flushable” self-care wipes, certain feminine hygiene products, and physical prophylactics among many other things. Despite what their labels say, these items can wreak havoc on your pipes, sewer lines, and plumbing fixtures. Some can even seriously degrade the quality of the municipal water supply and block the sewer main. Read on to find out why the only things that you should ever flush down your toilets are toilet paper and human and pet waste.
The Problem With “Flushable” Self-Care Wipes
“Flushable” self-care wipes easily flush down most toilets. Much like toilet paper, they’re unlikely to cause clogs and overflows when homeowners don’t use too many at once. However, after entering your plumbing system, they can go on to cause issues that even the strongest and highest-performing plunger can’t resolve.
Unlike toilet paper, which rapidly dissolves as soon as it’s submerged, these wipes can remain intact for weeks. Some “flushable” wipes don’t break down for up to three months. To make these products durable enough to create the clean, fresh feeling that consumers want, many “flushable” wipe manufacturers reinforce their wipes with durable polymers.
Once inside plumbing systems, flushable wipes attract and absorb fats. This includes any greases and oils that you’ve rinsed off your dishes, body oils, and oily residues from hair care products. Even residual fats from the foods you’ve consumed can adhere to flushed wipes. These fatty residues also cause “flushable” wipes to adhere to one another. This creates large clumps of increasingly solid waste that could get lodged in your sewer line or go on to cause problems within the municipal sewer system. Also known as “fatbergs” and “smallbergs”, these accumulations can weigh heavily on pipes, crack sewer lines, and create blockages within local wastewater management systems that impact entire neighborhoods.
If you use “flushable” wipes, always dispose of them in the trash. You can also switch to plumbing-safe toilet paper sprays or install a bidet.
Feminine Hygiene Products and How to Dispose of Them
Although you’ll find conveniently placed sanitary napkin boxes in public restrooms, few people have these at home. Despite their small sizes, tampons are terrible for residential plumbing systems. This is because these products are built for maximum absorbency. Once flushed, they’ll continue absorbing liquids until they reach capacity.
Even when fully saturated, tampons are still small enough to pass through clean sewer lines. However, they’re also large enough to get snagged on rough pipe interiors, invasive tree roots and weeds, and other existing obstructions within your plumbing system.
Sanitary napkins and sanitary liners are too large to flush without clogging most toilets. Even if you’ve done so successfully in the past, you should never flush these items for disposal. Your toilet is also the wrong place for discarding disposable, silicone menstrual cups and common prophylactics. All of these items should be placed into the waste bin or in a separate receptacle. For discretion, you can wrap them in toilet paper or a paper towel before disposal, or use small, biodegradable bags.
The Problem With Prophylactics
Prophylactics are any oral or physical product meant to prevent unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted infections (STIs). As far as plumbing systems go, both male and female condoms are problematic. Much like feminine hygiene products, these smaller items can get caught up on rough pipe interiors and other obstructions to diminish the rate of wastewater flow. While toilet paper and human waste break down as a result of submersion and movement, condoms can remain intact for many years. Made from latex and durable synthetics, they should always be disposed of in waste bins.
While far less likely to clog your commodes, unused oral prophylactics should also be tossed in the trash. These and other discarded pharmaceuticals can leave trace amounts of potentially harmful chemicals in the municipal water supply even after standard wastewater treatment is complete.
Paper Towels, Cotton Swabs, Diaper Liners, and More
While there aren’t any paper towels currently marketed as “flushable,” these products frequently wind up in toilet bowls. If you’re wiping down your bathroom counters and inadvertently drop a paper towel into your toilet, your best course of action is to quickly fish it out. This is also true of:
- Baby wipes
- Diaper liners
- Cotton swabs
- Surface-cleaning wipes
Whether or not something can be flushed down your toilet without causing an immediate clog is never a reliable gauge of whether it’s flushable.
Pet Waste Retrieved From Cat Litter
Like feminine hygiene products, the quality of cat litter is often measured by its absorbency. The quality of some cat litter is also measured according to its “clumping action” or its ability to make retrieving liquid waste easy.
If you keep your cat’s litter box in the bathroom, you might be tempted to shovel out solid waste and flush it down your toilet. However, doing so could lead to blockages if you’re capturing modest or larger amounts of litter along with it.
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), flushing pet waste without first putting it in a bag is the best and most environmentally friendly way to get rid of it. However, as per the EPA, you should never flush pet waste if your sewer line is connected to a septic tank rather than the municipal sewer system. Flushed pet waste can eventually clog your septic system’s drain field. In all cases, make sure that you’re flushing solid pet waste only and not clumps of solidified liquid waste or dry litter.
What to Do if You’ve Been Flushing the Wrong Items
If you’ve been flushing things like self-care wipes, paper towels, cotton swabs, and tampons or sanitary napkins, a sewer line blockage and whole-house backup could be looming just around the corner. Although these things have cleared your toilets, they may be snagged on rough pipe interiors or caught up on invasive tree roots or weeds. As long as they remain trapped in your sewer line, your outgoing waste and wastewater will have less room to move through. Worse still, solid waste and toilet paper can further compound these obstructions if they get snagged as well.
Fortunately, you can “reset” your plumbing system by scheduling drain and sewer line cleaning. Many plumbing companies use hydro-steaming or hydro-jetting to scour pipe interiors clean. Performed at plumbing clean-outs, these treatments force high volumes of hot, high-pressure steam or water into plumbing systems to push debris toward the municipal sewer main. In the process, they also slough off tough, tacky accumulations of in-pipe debris and remove rough build-ups of hard water minerals. In some instances, hydro-jetting is even powerful enough to break up underground growths that have encroached upon sewer lines. You might be in desperate need of these services if you have:
- Frequent drain clogs
- Stubborn drain odors
- Multi-drain issues
- Bubbling or gurgling sounds coming from your plumbing fixtures
If you have older pipes that won’t hold up well to hydro-jetting or hydro-steaming, rooter service can get rid of trapped materials as well.
It’s also important to get all household members on board with your efforts to protect your plumbing system from non-flushable items. Encourage residents to only send toilet paper and human or pet waste down your toilets.
We help homeowners in Gilbert, AZ protect their plumbing systems with top-notch drain cleaning, plumbing repair, and sewer line services. We also offer expert air conditioning, heating, and indoor air quality services. To schedule an appointment, give A/C & Plumbing Doctors a call today.