Thanks for the comments. Going back to my original post, I talked with my pa more. He said that large oak tree roots, impeding on our sewage system, were why he was once so passionate about obstructing tampon flushing. Apparently he was worried about “the strings on the tampons getting wrapped around tree roots”. Honestly I don’t think he has ever handled a tampon (new or used).
My girlfriend is a long-time lurker, so to avoid risking our relationship I’m going to describe my stand as “a woman’s right to choose”. The more we try to stop women from flushing tampons, the more they’re going to be in back alleys with clothes hangers disposing of those crusty things – straight into gutter drains. Though we might claim domestic sovereignty (and make courteous requests) – the more we try to fight the tampons, the larger they will expand. If your house was like Afghanistan, the bathroom would be the eastern mountains…
I witnessed this from traumatizing childhood fights between my sister and father. He would ask embarrassing, prying questions, and she would flush more. He would go through the trash and she would say, “Maybe I did flush the fucking tampon. What now dad?”
I was told Thing A about 15 years ago. Some women you know were told Thing B decades before that. And yet, I must just not have had their lessons reach me, versus them having incorrect or outdated information.
Maybe the “we lied, don’t flush tampons” lecture got delayed along with the “your husband owns you” ones.
Nope.
“Gee, you got some information that directly contradicting things we’d been claiming, such as tampons causing terrible damage to systems even if they made it into the main sewer lines. … Uh, *clearly *you spoke with a biased source.”
This question is blindingly nonsensical. Who said it’s impossible to not flush tampons? It’s simply messy, inconvenient, and unhygenic.
So, by your analogy, the correct response is to lock yourself in your house and throw away your car keys. If you don’t provide photographic evidence of having done so by this time tomorrow, I’m going to consider you to be a murderer every time a car crash happens.
Because someone with a penis thinks he knows better than I do *what women have been taught *about tampon usage.
Great! So post this information in your city’s bathrooms so I know your systems blow and I can’t flush my tampons, and I’ll happily treat you to the stench of my rotting menstrual fluids.
No shit. Maybe later you can pull up an article about the crypto outbreak in the '90s, to teach me about yet another thing I’ve lived through. (And you wonder why we think your side is being condescending?) Personally, I can’t believe you think that tampons on top of raw feces are anything remotely resembling a concern. Personally, if I were stupid enough to try to go on the beaches after one of those overflows, I’d *welcome *a floating tampon to tell my dumb ass, “Hey, moron, this water is full of raw fucking sewage.”
When did I get thinskinned? When I expressed incredulity that anyone could *possibly *have not understood that I was not literally suggesting that someone eat tampons?
And I’ve quoted these last few just 'cause they were so awesome.
Regardless, there’s probably not a sewer system in the U.S. that doesn’t suck because of all of the deferred investment on our sewer systems. The American Society of Civil Engineers recently graded our nation’s sewer systems at a “D-” in its recent Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. The report notes that the EPA estimates that the nation must invest $390 billion over the next 20 years to update or replace existing systems and build new ones to meet increasing demand.
So if you already know about it, why do you keep contributing to the problem?
People may start to come across as condescending when they attempt to “fight ignorance” and are completely ignored or told they don’t know what they’re talking about because they don’t personally use tampons.
I guess you missed the rest of my post:
The reason people are getting exasperated is because even though you were apparently told it was OK to do this years ago, it’s also apparent that you intend to ignore any effort to convince you that this is not a good idea today. (Actually, it was never a good idea.) People did a lot of things decades ago that are no longer acceptable, like throw trash out their car windows, pour motor oil on the ground or down storm drains, and dump hazardous waste into the nearest unlined hole in the ground.
Besides, the average person has little or no knowledge about where sewage goes once they flush the toilet. I had a woman a few months ago react in surprise that every building in her town was on a septic system, including all of the businesses, the schools, the town hall, etc. (She apparently thought that only residences could be on septic systems.) I don’t know why this would have been so surprising to her, considering that the topic of the public meeting she was attending was to discuss whether the town should spend $12 million on installing sanitary sewers in the town for the first time. The reason why the town was considering spending money for sewers was because they were under a consent order to replace the high school’s septic system, which was projected to cost $2.5 million just for the one system. Here’s the kicker–one big reason the septic system had failed was because of all of the inappropriate things, including rubbish, that had been flushed down toilets and sinks at the school.
Even if there are sewers in place (as opposed to a septic system), there may be small diameter grinder pumps and low pressure sewers between you and the main sewer line, there may be lift stations, or there may be gravity sewers with insufficient flow or slope to move rubbish along. Or your system may have antequated (and illegal) combined sewer overflows, like your own system in Milwaukee.
In all cases, however, the best advice is to avoid using the toilet as a trash can.
Ah, I read “mine” as being “my system” but apparently you meant “my cite.”
Because a properly functioning system in good repair has no problem with tampons. So tell me if yours is fucked up, and I won’t flush them. To reuse an analogy from upthread, do you feed all people over the age of 60 thickened water, just because some them may have dysphagia?
If you try to correct me what women are taught when every woman I know was taught something else and you’re not a woman to boot, you’re being condescending. If someone says that conservative Christians are taught that the planet is six thousand years old, the correct response from an atheist is not to say that no, you’re taught it’s four billion.
No, I guess **you **missed the rest of mine:
And do any of these things still claim they can be disposed of in this way on their respective packages?
I’ve toured a waste treatment center here in Milwaukee. Like I said upthread.
Good thing I use it to only dispose of bodily wastes and other flushables like TP and tampons, then.
Wrong. Even a properly functioning system can get backups from tampons. And how do you know if the whole system between your toilet and the wastewater treatment plant is in “good repair”? And what is your basis for stating this? The guy you called who told you that “local systems” and laterals may in fact have a problem with tampons? The same guy who failed to tell you that his system discharges millions of gallons of untreated sewage a year into local waterways?
BTW, I find it condescending for you tell me what a “properly functioning” sewer system can and cannot do. I’m a licensed professional engineer (P.E.) with a Master’s degree and 15+ years experience in the water and wastewater industry. What’s your expertise in this field? A comparable time spent flushing tampons down the toilet? :rolleyes:
As I’ve stated, just about every sewer system in the U.S. is “fucked up” and in serious need of repair, just like our roads and bridges. This includes your system, with its illegal combined sewer overflows.
As I’ve already stated, there is no standard for what “flushable” means, and the makers of tampons don’t design and maintain sewers.
Great. Have you also cleared a blockage or taken apart and cleaned out a wastewater pump?
Toilet paper is flushable. Tampons are not–they are trash, and should be disposed of in a trash can.
I’d like a cite that a system with no corrosion and no intrusions (e.g., treeroots) is at a *reasonable *risk for clogs from tampons.
Why would he tell me something that’s common knowledge? If that’s the best you can do, I’ll point out that *you *didn’t tell me the sky is blue, so apparently that makes you untrustworthy. :rolleyes: His point is that the system is built to handle tampons–they don’t damage the system because they filter them out with other stuff that won’t go through the process that urine and feces do.
Which has absolutely zero to do with the system being able or unable to handle tampons. Unless you think it rains tampons. In which case you can go hang out with the guy who thinks that grown women are going to eat them.
So I take it you don’t drive on any of those for anything other than life-threatening emergencies, then? Since you’re just hastening their eventual collapse.
Great. So you can show me where they’ve been sued, even unsuccessfully, to take those misleading and highly damaging claims off their advertising and packaging. Unless there’s some sort of Vast Tampon Conspiracy.
First off, a system with no corrosion and no intrusions doesn’t exist, unless your whole sewer system, from toilet to pump station to treatment plant was recently constructed. Many, if not most, of the older cities in the U.S. have 100-year old sanitary sewer systems constructed on top of 150-year old combined sewer systems, and have been using a system of band-aids and emergency fixes to keep the system going.
Next, you don’t even know if your own lateral has an intrusion or not (such as a tree root) unless you’re conducting routine TV inspections of your lateral, and that of every toilet you use outside your house. Just last month, I actually did a lateral inspection program in a typical neighborhood in my area. More than half of the laterals had severe tree root intrusions, and none of the residents evidently had a clue. People don’t generally find out they have a problem with their lateral until the sewage backs up into their basement.
In any event, I already gave you a couple of cites, and neither of them said anything about corrosion or sewer intrusions.
However, here’s another example of a utility having problems with inappropriate items being flushed, such that they issued an appeal to the public:
Here is a whole discussion about how bad flushable wipes, dental floss, tampons, and condoms can be for a house that is connected to the sanitary sewer system, but uses a small sewage grinder pump to get the sewage from the house to the main line. (Grinder pumps are very common in my area, especially in rocky, hilly areas connected to smaller local systems.)
I could keep doing this all day. There are hundreds, if not thousands of sewer utilities all telling people not to dispose of tampons into the sanitary sewer system. I’m an engineer at a sewer utility. I’m asking you not to do it. What more do you want?
I don’t know, but then again, I thought it was common knowledge that you shouldn’t flush tampons down the toilet, too. In any event, if it’s common knowledge that sewage from your municipal system routinely overflows into local waterways, why do you think it’s OK to put your tampon into the combined sewers so that it ends up in the environment?
And my point is that your municipal system is designed to overflow raw sewage into local rivers and Lake Michigan during heavy storm events. So I would argue that your system is in fact NOT designed to handle waste that doesn’t quickly break down in the environment, like your tampons.
I don’t think you understand exactly what a combined sewer system is, or you wouldn’t be making senseless comments like this.
Your typical municipality has neither the time nor the inclination to start suing tampon manufacturers. Nevertheless, there have been cites like the ones mentioned in Post #199 about how so-called “flushable” items really aren’t.
If after this whole discussion, you think that this is simply a matter of “opinion,” then I don’t know what to say.
An amusing anecdote: when I was a young girl of about 7 or 8, our class was learning about the sexual organs of boys and girls and their functions. The class was divided by gender, and the girls learned about periods and what to do when they approach.
Our teacher had some pads and tampons in her purse, and wanted to demonstrate how they worked. She was a little flustered, being a new teacher and not prepared for sex ed, and the only thing she had on hand was the glass of water she had been drinking from. She dipped the tampon into the glass.
Immediately the tampon swelled several inches to fill the entire glass. Everyone in the audience shrieked in fear and our poor teacher had to explain that no, it expands to fit inside you but it’s not actually this big inside you, they don’t hurt, honest!
I guess what I’m trying to say with this anecdote is that tampons are a product designed specifically to become lodged in tubes, soak up liquids and expand to several times their actual size if necessary. My common sense tells me that it doesn’t seem right to flush these down the toilet. I mean, the experiences of many in this thread suggests that there are no obvious immediate consequences in doing so, but there are plenty of things that are physically possible to flush which I don’t flush because that’s not what toilets are designed for.
I guess it’s how you’ve been taught as a child to treat tampons. If you’ve been taught to flush them, you understand perfectly, and if you’ve been taught to bin them, you understand perfectly. Facial tissues are something we use all the time, they contain yucky bodily fluids that transmit disease, but we don’t flush them. I’m sure if I went and flushed a whole bunch of facial tissues right now, there’d be no immediate consequences, and I’m not sure of the long-term consequences to the plumbing if I were to do so, but tissues go in the bin, not in the toilet. Tampons also go in the bin, not in the toilet.
Toilets are designed to dispose of things that disintegrate in water, such as feces and toilet paper. Toilet paper is designed specifically to disintegrate in water as quickly as possible - soak some TP, and it will immediately begin to deteriorate and disintegrate. Tampons are specifically designed not to disintegrate in water, so I don’t know what you expect your sewage system to do with them. They’ll have to be filtered out manually, like everything else that isn’t supposed to be flushed.
This ended up being much longer than I was anticipating.
robby, what I don’t understand is what’s *so damned hard *about just asking people not to flush tampons in the cases where it’s a problem. On one hand, you’re trying to get me to change a behavior universally to deal with something that is only a problem part of the time; but on the other hand, you are refusing to concede that a better idea would be to simply post or verbally communicate when a particular bathroom shouldn’t have tampons flushed in it, despite the fact that tampons *are *considered to be flushable by many women.
ALL I am asking is for people to **just fucking tell me **when **their **toilets can’t handle tampons. I fail to see why this is such a fucking chore, but *I *should be expected to create a lot of extra waste at a hassle to myself *just in case *a system can’t handle them, which still doesn’t solve the problem of every other woman who didn’t magically know that your system can’t handle them.
And Milwaukee’s sewage overflow problems aren’t relevant because they’re not a tampon problem. *Every single woman *in Milwaukee could stop flushing tampons *this second *and our sewers would *still *be dumping raw sewage when they were overloaded, and it would be just as bad.
Which they have systems designed to do, because a certain amount of non-quickly-degradable items are 100% inevitable.
Don’t look at me–I didn’t start it! (Either of them, actually.)
Otheres, including me, have noted that there has been an educational effort for decades now to teach women not to do this.
Perhaps you can’t understand that someone mught not know if their system cna handle it or not, and the only way to know for sure os to have a backup and be forced to repair it.
Perhaps you can’t or don’t understand that such thngs can change day to day - a tree root grows just enough to block a distant drain pipe, or a pipe reaches a critical mass of rust inside. What worked an hour ago might not work now.
Also, and I kow this form experience, if the blocked spot is far enough downstream, sucha a tree root near where the drain meets the sewer pip in the street, it will back up internally for a good long time before something, anything, even water inthe sink, tops it off and causes the system to overflow.
So it is not that your tampon is going to cause a backup immediately, it is that it could happen eventually, when you are not there. someone else will be forced to deal with it, and you may never know how many backups you have actually caused already.
People have already told you - the default assumption, is that NO toilet can handle it.
If anyone is concerned about this happening, they can still ask me not to flush. I’m not going to demand evidence–it’s their toilet, they get to decide what I can send down it.
And I’ve already explained to you why I think that’s crap. (No pun intended.)
Yes, and you are simply wrong. The media for women, especially starting with younger women, has been telling you exactly the message you say you need someone to remind you each time you step into a toilet. 10s if not 100s of millions of women have gotten the message and taken it to heart over a period of at least 3 decades. You are not so special that you alone get to demand more than tha, and not persuasive at all, that you are open to hearing it.
Similarly, I politely ask that people individually request that I’d not sneeze in their faces. I can cover my sneezes easily, but will only do so if specifically directed prior to each sternutation.
And Andy Dufresne thought the warden was deliberately obtuse…
That’s really the point of my comments in this thread–to get you to realize that tampons (or anything besides human waste and toilet paper) should NOT be considered flushable. I realize that you were taught that this was OK years ago. I’m here telling you that it actually wasn’t OK, and today, with your typical aging municipal sewer system, it’s particularly not OK.
And as I have said repeatedly, the owner of the toilet has no real idea if it’s going to be a problem or not. The owner of the toilet likely has no idea what the condition of their internal plumbing or sewer lateral is (until and unless there is a problem), and very few lay people have any idea what the condition is of the sewer mains, the pumping stations, etc. between them and the treatment plant.
Even then, in systems like yours with combined sewer overflows, or other leaking systems with excessive inflow and infiltration (which can lead to sanitary sewer overflows), the condition of the sewers changes from day to day and even from hour to hour. If an overflow situation exists, much of the sewage and trash goes into the nearest local waterway (i.e. streams and rivers).
The other issue is that flushing inappropriate materials down toilets can be a problem of scale. There may be no issue if it’s just you flushing a single tampon down the toilet. Combine your tampon with your neighbor’s wad of dental floss, your other neighbor’s condoms, another neighbor’s so-called flushable wipes, and the “flushable” kitty litter the lady with all the cats puts down her toilet, and you’re much more likely to have a problem.
Just based on the responses in this thread, I’d wager that most women have gotten the message and do not flush feminine hygiene products down the toilet…which may be why your sewer system person thinks it’s currently “not an issue.” I’d also bet that it could likely become an issue if more women were to do so.
(This is not unlike the issue with people littering. It may not be much of an issue if one person throws their coffee cup out their car window, but it creates a real problem if everyone does it. And the litterers are not justified in littering just because the state or the municipality hires people to pick up litter.)
Even if all this trash successfully makes it to the wastewater treatment plant and doesn’t cause a backup (filling someone’s basement with sewage), all you’ve done is to increase the costs at the treatment plant, where they have to dredge all of this additional sludge, dry it, and truck it to the landfill.
Wouldn’t it be far easier if we skipped all that and just put it in the trash where it belongs? Solid waste is best handle by the solid waste disposal system (via trucks, transfer stations, and landfills), not the sewer system.
I have a tenant this past week that flushed about 4 of them. Needless to say, the line plugged and septic tank spillage ran up into my pool house thru the drain lines, and flooded into the floor, into the kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, the tub, the toilet, and up thru the washing machine drain line. When it came thru the washing machine drain line, it ran down the wall and into the washing machine. From the wall it covered the floor, soaked into some very expensive lounge chair cushions I had stored in the floor (against the wall) in the pool house, and it seeped thru the wall (at the floor junction) into the machine room. It is cool her in GA now, so we are not using the pool house right now. It was discovered when a repair person came by to check on an intercom speaker that was not working. Boy was he surprised, then he shocked me.
I went outside and opened the drain line release cap, and out popped 4 tampons.
We had to have a septic tank pumping company come out and unplug the line, and a Hazardous Material company come out to clean up the “Hazardess Waste”. The septic tank company charged $275, the Haz Mat company charged us $1100 for the clean up, the cushions (very nice ones) will cost $350 to replace, plus there were ohther things damaged by the mess and will cost about $500 to fix or replace. So, a few tampons cost us about $2225 to get us back to before the flush! We do have insurance that is suppose to help, and we have $1000 deductible. Several days have been involved and no amount of money will cover the extra work and frustration, much less the stench that will be present for a while. We still have to deal with the insurance which will be a pain too. (along with showing proof of damaged items, etc.)
In her rental contract it specifically states that she is to NOT flush any feminine Hygiene products, and if she does and it causes any damage, she is liable. She will be paying the deductible! But that does not cover the time/aggravation we have spent supervising this mess so far.
Both the Septic Tank company and the HAZ MAT company told me that this is a very common problem, they get lots of calls all the time for the same exact thing, and they make a lot of money off of people that feel it is okay to flush them.
