The bathroom in El Supermercado (SW Detroit) has a sign in Spanish telling the employees to please put their used paper in the toilet, and not the trash can. Many of the bathrooms in my plant in Mexico have fancier signs indicating that the paper is biodegradable, please flush it down!
Most bathrooms that I’ve had to use in Mexico, in fact, do accept paper. Every once in a while, though, I’ve had to go to some rustic place where it wouldn’t go down.
If you consider that immigrants are poor people from rustic places, it’s easy to see why they would bring that habit with them. They just don’t know – even in their own country – that the vast majority of non-rustic toilets work just fine with paper.
Generally a septic tank is a storage tank where the waste is worked on by bacteria and broken down into liquid form. Then the septic tank drains into a cesspool or cesspit or field drain where it soaks into the soil. That was the set-up where I was raised in rural Idaho. One time our cesspool quit draining and the system started backing up. We had to find and dig up the cap to the cesspool and have it pumped out. Then we chucked dynamite into the cesspool to jar the sides open so it would drain. I was told it was made of cinder block and shaped sort of like a bee hive. The dynamite must have worked; we had to do it only that once. We flushed our TP there.
In Paraguay, though, the TP went into a bin beside the toilet, when we were in places that had flush toilets. We were out in the boondocks much of the time, using outhouses.
There was a Puerto Rican guy I used to work with who was identified as a serial TP-trash-dropper after weeks of investigation. Turns out his family always did it because they had shitty plumbing growing up.
My maternal grandparents lived in a rural area of Eastern Washington. There was no sewage system out where they lived, so they relied on a septic tank. The tank must be very old, since it was cast iron and had to be placed about eight feet underground. (From what people have told me, modern septic systems are nearly at ground level and made of hard plastic.) If you tried to flush more toilet paper more than once, it would start clogging up the toilet. Therefore we had dump our paper in the bin. Did it smell? Only a little bit; not suprisingly you tended to use much more paper than needed so only a little of it actually had waste on it. Plus, when you live on a farm like my grandparents you tend to have much higher tolerances for smells than city folks. When you compared the smell to the chicken coops, pig sty, and an honest to goodness outhouse also on their property we barely noticed it.
Definitely old septic system, country poor, or DIY plumbing project because plumbling works the same way there than in the states, and I hadn’t even heard of putting TP in the bin until I travelled to Brazil. Granted, that is why I put old septic systems, since I didn’t go to places that had them. The newer country houses I went had newer systems, and I don’t remember any talk about disposing of paper elsewhere.
In rural Spain 5 years ago I rented a house where the plumbing could not cope with TP. It was kind of difficult to remember to bin the paper rather than flush, but the sign threatening a 2000 Euro fine for backed up toilets helped:eek: