Wet Wipes Box Says Flush, New York’s Sewer System Says Don’t | Hacker News Reader

Wet Wipes Box Says Flush, New York’s Sewer System Says Don’t

nytimes.com

68 pointsprostoalex60 comments

The new york times article wasn't very clear about how people are using them. So I'll spell it out: adults are using these wet wipes instead of toilet paper. That's why so many are entering sewage systems.

NYT put their writing skills to work on wet wipe awareness

  demon snowballs
  industry representatives chafe 
  scraping the bottom clean

Growing up as a kid, my dream job was to be the guy who wrote those cheesy headlines, like "Man Attacked By Crows, Fowl Play Suspected" and such. I didn't realize it is still a viable career option.

"Murder: Man Attacked by Group of Crows"

The `most celebrated Post wood [0] of all time: "Headless body in topless bar."`[1]

[0] Wood is a banner headline, because the largest handset letters were made of wood to save costs.

[1] http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2012/01/5137028/...

There's a similar one, possibly apocryphal. When Michael Foot led a nuclear disarmament organization, a newspaper ran with

  "Foot Heads Arms Body"

My personal favourite: A while back, tight-rope walkers crossed the Han river in Korea. The Washington Post chose to run with

  "Skywalkers in Korea Crossed Han Solo"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05...

I prefer "Book Lack in Onger".

"When I asked colleagues around the office to nominate a favourite, the one that came up most frequently was (not from the Guardian), Book lack in Ongar - on a report about a crisis in the library service in Essex. (For the benefit of English language students at the international school in Frankfurt, whose teacher asked for a glossary of headline puns, this one is a play - no pun intended - on the title of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger)."

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jan/26/books.guardianr...

Or possibly "How do you solve a problem like Korea?" from the Sun: http://btoe-images.s3.amazonaws.com/things/large/how-do-you-...

My favorite from the Chicago Tribute[1] re: the infamous chocolate factory...

"EPA not cuckoo for cocoa powder"

[1]http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-11-04/news/051104011...

My favorite is when Jaime Sin (a Cardinal) visited Rome and the headline was, "Cardinal Sin in Rome!"

Correct, obligatory link to a startup offering a subscription on this https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/one-wipe-charlies

Do those contain alcohol? I can't imagine it's a good idea to repeatedly apply that to the anus.

They don't contain alcohol. Why in the world would they contain alcohol?

Wet wipes are produced as air-laid paper where the fibres are carried and formed to the structure of paper by air. They are moistened with water or other liquids like isopropyl alcohol depending on the applications.

It's not uncommon for wet wipes to contain a bit of rubbing alcohol for anti-microbial purposes.

Regular toilet paper seems absolutely barbaric after one has become accustomed to wet wipes. Try them and you will understand.

Wait until you try a bidet. Any form of wiping will seem like savagery afterwards.

I had my gallbladder removed at the end of 06. TP became less effective. I switched to wetwipes in 09, and got a bidet two years ago. Dear lord my life is genuinely SO much better now. It was an inexpensive $100 stainless steel addon for a regular toilet, and so incredibly worth it.

I've lived in three different countries in Asia. Have always had a mini-shower or at least a piped jet of water beside the toilet to help clean up. North America has the most bass-ackwards wiping convention I've ever seen.

This is the 21st century. We should be able to do a lot better. We should be able to have our sphinctors replaced with an artificial valve. This should be a standard size (or one of several standard sizes if one size does not fit all) and standard mechanism.

When you have to go, you sit down at a waste collection station, and a computer guided arm would connect a hose to your valve and open it. This can be designed so that at no time in this process is anything on the outside of the valve, the hose, or your body exposed to feces. All the feces goes into the hose. When you have been emptied, the valve is closed, the hose retracts, and its interior is cleaned.

That is how civilized people would take a crap (until we reach Star Trek levels of technology...then we'd just beam our feces out).

Better than a Bidet = the Hand Bidet Sprayer. It requires no new plumbing and can go in any bathroom including a rental. See www.bathroomsprayers.com.

Wet wipes are terrible for the environment. There are plenty of other alternatives. Please look into them. The real luxury is clear, warm running water.

Wet wipes do not biodegrade, no matter what the package says.

A bidet attachment for your toilet is only ~40 dollars and will make wet wipes seem barbaric as well.

And if that sounds like too much, Amazon has super well-rated bidets for around $25-$30 that have served me well.

I'd rather remain in ignorance, then. Lots of things are hard to go without once you've tried them, like heroin or scraping the inside of your ear canal with q-tips, but that doesn't mean those things enhance your life any.

You know you can put a bit of water on toilet paper to make it wet, right?

Unless you're at work, where you usually don't get the luxury of having a sink inside the stall.

I never understood this suggestion. I've tried it, the toilet paper shreds and gets stuck everywhere, including my hands. It's a huge mess.

Most of Asia believes in washing, not wiping. There's nothing easier to flush than water and no better way to clean yourself. Being expected to wipe yourself with a thin piece of paper and consider the job done was among the bigger culture shocks when I first moved to the US.

I'm not Asian, but the first thing I do whenever I move into a new living situation for any duration greater than one month is to install a bidet.

Does a bidet use more or less water than wiping?

urm, how does one use water with wiping?

to answer your question: you use more water but significantly less paper (you still need some with a bidet to dry yourself)

Water is used in creating the paper.

I wish our society would start holding companies responsible for the costs like this. They externalize the costs to society and it should not be tolerated and it should even be illegal to knowingly externalize costs without offering to pay for the impact. It is really tantamount to theft of public resources.

Bidets and washlets are the more economical option anyways. Wet wipes aren't cheap. Even if you spend $250+ on a somewhat fancier "warm water cleaning toilet seat", you'll break-even in no time.

That's even true if you use regular toilet paper, because you'll need a lot less of that.

the $30 one from amazon is pretty awesome and I can't imagine not having it.

My experience too. I wanted a fancy heated Toto with air and such but settled for a $30 one on a whim. The heated water of the Toto units is nice but in practice it isn't a big deal. I still use toilet paper to dry though so I'm not sure how much savings there is. But overall it is a much cleaner experience that I highly recommend.

> Web wipes aren't cheap.

Asterisk-mart sells 48 sheets for $4. If you go macro first with regular TP and thus use one wipe per session, folding it over as needed for coverage, let's say you max out at $6 worth of wipes for a month because you don't know you're sensitive to gluten yet and you also wipe up some cat vomit every few days.

That's still only $72 a year, man.

Now: How many bathrooms does your house have? Let's say you have two bathrooms and want to use both. $500 on toilet seats? Better hope you're not a 300 pounder who rocks back and forth a bit when he's in a hurry, cuz you don't get Apple Care with those seats I'll bet.

If you travel every once in a while, or need to use bathrooms at work, there's that factor too.

> If you travel every once in a while, or need to use bathrooms at work, there's that factor too.

If I catch someone traipsing to the restroom with a box of wet wipes under their arm, they're not going to make it without being made fun of. Sorry, princess, but your anus isn't really all that special.

Please start a YouTube channel of your exploits.

Maybe realize you have two options here, and someone taking appropriate hygiene measures is definitely more of a benefit for you in the short term than them.

Yes, it is. When you've had recurring perianal abscess and/or a fistulotomy, you'll also want to take every care possible when it comes to Uranus.

> That's still only $72 a year, man.

You didn't include the regular TP. With a bidet or washlet, you'll need a lot less of that, too.

> $500 on toilet seats?

There are much cheaper options available. As another commenter mentioned, you can get a non-electrical attachment for as little as $30.

For example:

http://www.amazon.com/Luxe-Bidet-Neo-110-Non-Electric/dp/B00...

Edit: Also, you were comparing the price for upgrading two toilets with the wet wipes expenses for a single person.

Here's a couple of articles about the impact on Australian sewerage systems, with similar comments about needing to regulate the "flushable" label.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/wet-wipes-blocking...

http://www.pumpindustry.com.au/luxury-wet-wipes-wreak-havoc-...

Why don't they make degradable/dissolvable wet wipes then? Maybe some pre-moistened quad-ply toilet paper? I can't think of a reason the current wet wipes need to be virtually tear-proof.

Ordinary toilet paper disintegrates quickly when wet, by design. Pre-moistened wipes made of toilet paper would just be a box full of pulp when opened. That's the problem with the wipes, they don't fall apart when they are wet so they clog up the sewer systems.

Just sell the dry wipes and the moist in a bottle or something. Add a snazzy packaging and BAM!

One of the big problems in the sewers is that the wet wipes combine with various sorts of fat.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/23586290

It looks to me like the oil and wet wipes combination is substantially less likely to break down than either individually.

It's because they're wet.

Contrast what happens to wet TP: it goes to mush.

A dissolvable wet wipe doesn't seem all that feasible as what is it supposed to take to make it dissolve? A dry wet wipe that you wet and then wipe with which then dissolves is...toilet paper.

I live near to where the legendary 'Fatberg' was found and, after reading this article, I would not be surprised if a more accurate name for the 'Fatberg' was 'Wet Wipe Berg'. The 'Fatberg' concept is new in the story of sewer blockages yet people have been using less fat in their cooking rather than more. Ready meals and microwave ovens have cut the amount of greasy fry-ups. What has changed is the wet wipe. Crucially the wet wipe is marketed differently nowadays. You can get a pack of 100 bathroom wipes that are larger than the original branded Wet Wipes and have people use 1-2 of them every time they want to use the seat just in cleaning that seat. As far as the consumer is concerned, flushable means it goes over the U-bend. If the packaging didn't state it was flushable then most people wouldn't flush these overgrown 'Wet Wipes'. Simple solution - don't have any products be sold as 'flushable', ever.

Similarly I found out that Metro Vancouver's food scraps recycling system can't handle "compostable" plastic bags, though these bags are sold everywhere. Shouldn't the region be putting pressure on grocers to stop selling these products?

Here is a article about samething but in Canada. Also touches on the issue in Washington state and new York.

Article also from 2013... So I guess the problems only worsened? http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/canada/flushable-wipes-clogging-can...

The solution I'd suggest: mandate sticking warnings on all wet wipes sold in New York. Retailers or manufacturers must then add stickers or something to comply.

That won't stop many people from buying them.

You'll never stop jerks being jerks. But you can clue in the clueless

Url changed from http://qz.com/362361/wet-wipes-are-wreaking-havoc-on-our-sew..., which points to this.

Thanks, any time a nytimes.com or wsj.com article is involved, I'm never sure if people can see the article or face the paywall.

New York Times is cookie based, which I'm sure most of us can get around :)

But I'm not sure about WSJ.

0942v8653 has it right. NYT is fine. WSJ is harder.

if you google the title of the article, then click on the first result, you'll bypass the WSJ paywall. IIRC, it works for the times, too, but not 100% sure.

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