Thread by @airbagmoments

A thread about "flushable" wipes and the end of civilization.
(For those keeping track, that's a triple pun!)

One of early civilizations' most important developments was the management of water, both fresh water coming into a community and sewage leaving the community.

The earliest examples of such a system go back at least 5,000 years!

While many advancements have since been made, including chemical treatment of waste water and powerful pumping equipment, a lot of the basic principles and techniques from ancient sewers are still in use today.

The "bottom" line is that these systems work so so well that most people now take them for granted.

Like immunization, smart phones, and modern agriculture, an urban sewer system is a nearly unbelievable miracle that now seems too boring to even learn the functional details of.

Widespread ignorance of wastewater systems leads to abuse of those systems on a scale that can actually cause them to fail.

When you see water coming out of a sewer manhole something has gone very wrong. That's raw sewage coming back to haunt us like a forgotten debt.

Sometimes such failures are nobody's fault.

But increasingly they are caused by a pernicious combination of ignorance and capitalism.

Toilet paper was specifically designed to dissolve quickly in water and so is not a problem in sewer systems.

Wet wipes, however, were designed NOT to dissolve in liquid.

Think about it: If they did then when you opened the package of them you'd find a wet formless mass.

If a lot of people started flushing wet wipes local sewer systems would face a terrible problem.

But everyone is smart, and the companies that manufacture and market them make it very clear on packaging that they should not be flushed, so there's no problem. (Sarcasm emoji 🙄)

Okay that last sentence is fake news. In fact wet wipes makers just lie blatantly on their packaging to claim they are flushable.

They are flushable the same way puppies or lit sticks of dynamite are flushable. You can do it, but it's a bad idea.

And citizens' ignorance about their crucial civic infrastructure combined with government's inability to ban this product or at least require a big "DON'T FLUSH" warning on the packaging are creating huge problems for sewer systems.

(Manufacturers, of course, are dead-set against putting "NOT FLUSHABLE" on their packaging because nobody is going to toss poop wipes into their little decorative powder-room trashcans.)

In Charleston, SC a few days ago there was a giant wet wipe monster clogging a pump almost 100 feet down in a well. Divers had to go into the raw sewage with zero visibility to find and clear it with their (gloved) hands.

Gross.

That's so deep, by the way, that it requires divers to decompress in the sewage on their way back up to the surface. Then they get to be hosed down with bleach!

All this trouble so the most ignorant people in your community can pamper their rectums.

A 250 meter long "fatberg" made of grease and wet wipes recently clogged a huge section of London's system. theguardian.com/environment/20…

Which brings me to the point about civilization.

We clever humans figured out how to create sewer systems, which are INCREDIBLY difficult to construct and manage even without fcking wet wipes.

But this is not just about sewers.

Capitalism's tendency to generate unnecessary and harmful products meets conservative aversion to banning/regulating such products meets consumer ignorance and selfishness in any number of areas.

Maybe we can afford to eventually create sewer systems that can handle wet wipes - or maybe we can't - or maybe the free hand of supply and demand will generate some other product that even those sewers won't be able to handle.

But it would be a lot cheaper to convince everyone not to use wet wipes - if such a thing can be done.

If we are so decadent and degenerate that we can't even get people to not use wet wipes, it's kind of a fatal bug in modern civilization.

It's so much harder to get politicians, businesses, and the masses to do pretty much anything to mitigate climate change.

If we can't do anything about something as simple, unnecessary, and damaging as wet wipes, well, then the whole biosphere is probably screwed. (end)

Timely update. bloomberg.com/news/features/…

🙄
#LateCapitalism #LateCrapitalism

UPDATE: Charleston, SC sued a manufacturer of these pseudo-flushables wipes. postandcourier.com/business/charl…