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Comment by RawaHorse | Hacker News Reader

I have bidets/washlets installed in my home, and the only problem has been that I now can't go back. Whenever I travel I now have to carry around wet wipes or I don't feel clean. But wet wipes are apparently horrible for the environment.

I can't win.

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The problem with wet wipes is mostly that they should never, absolutely never, be flushed. Wet wipes combine with fat in the sewers, and form the basis of an ever growing deposit of solid mass that will inevitably block the sewer (or pipes if you are unlucky and the stuff builds up at an earlier point).

When these deposits grow in size they are known as fatbergs. In London they have had to remove fatbergs the size of double-decker buses, but it's a global problem.

If you use wet wipes, the rule is simple: deposit them in the trash can — just like period products and nappies.

Don't bother believing the 'flushable' wipes lie: all wipes are flushable for sure, but they all contribute to the problem, and none disintegrate before they mix with fat to become a potentially very expensive problem.

> if you use wet wipes, the rule is simple: deposit them in the trash can — just like period products and nappies.

In most of south asia you are not even supposed to flush normal toilet paper, the waste systems there just cannot handle it.

Maybe plumbing needs a general upgrade from being simply gravity assisted, to something like this

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_disposal_unit

which shreds anything to tiny pieces, which then again can flow freely, instead of being stuck somewhere?

What is more expensive? Cleaning out fatbergs, or have something like this installed at whichever 'layer' in the plumbing, or making bidets mandatory?

(Err...1st world problems while elsewhere many peoply shit who knows where...)

I don’t actually like bidets or similar solutions, as they don’t clean as thoroughly as wet wipes IMO.

Personally I just always carry wet wipes, and always use them, and always have. Can’t live without them, and can’t imagine how others can tbh.

> as they don’t clean as thoroughly as wet wipes IMO

Once you have a bidet, your regular TP is equivalent to a wet wipe.

If you're using the ones that are almost cloth-like strength, those really shouldn't be flushed down most sewage systems, even if they're marked as supposedly "flushable": https://www.today.com/series/one-small-thing/are-flushable-w...

> If you're using the ones that are almost cloth-like strength, those really shouldn't be flushed down most sewage systems, even if they're marked as supposedly "flushable"

I have a kind of wet-wipes which are almost cloth-like strength, but dissolve into just a milky jelly liquid if they are in water for a few minutes (I’ve checked products tests first before choosing this specific brand, they even dissolve fast enough to work in train toilets without clogging them up, if you wait a bit before flushing).

NDR Markt has tested different brands available at German stores in 2016, and showed quite extreme differences, while some products had already mostly dissolved after 10 minutes, others were after 3 hours still without any change: https://www.ndr.de/ratgeber/verbraucher/Wie-Feuchttuecher-di...

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