flushed away

did you know that water companies across England & Wales are getting hundreds of calls a day about sewage blockages!?!

one of the main culprits..."flushable wet wipes"

wet wipes have been around for decades. we use them to remove make-up, wipe our babies bottoms, wipe our bottoms & clean the house. there are so many forms of wet wipe on the market & many of them have been found to be made up of three quarters polyester, which makes them extremely tough.

in the last few years 'flushable' bum wipes have been pushed by brands such as Andrex to the consumer. yes they do a fab job at cleaning your botty, but are in no way flushable. during the testing stage, yes after minutes & minutes of being sloshed back and forth they do eventually break down, but this is not a true representation of what happens in your toilet at home.

you flush your toilet, there is a little swirl or gush of water to push everything down & that is it!

so thanks to many of us using these little wipes and chucking these & god know's what else down the toilet, daily sewer blockages across the UK are a big & expensive deal! we're talking about £1 million a month just on cleaning out sewer blockages. & that's nothing on the detrimental effects wet wipes have on the environment!

i must point out that its not just wet wipes that end up down our toilets; tampons, sanitary towels, condoms & nappies all add to the problem.

so to taking a look at the environmental damage this stuff is causing, did you know it can take up to 100 years to biodegrade! with the constant use they will accumulate for many years to come.

with our flushing these items they can end up getting washed out to sea & the polyester fibers can clog up an animal's stomach if ingested, effectively making them feel full & thus causing a risk of starvation.

these fibers can also be swallowed by barnacles, scallops, crabs & fish, which runs the risk that they could get into the human food chain.

everything we humans do has a knock on effect on our environment. the safest way to dispose of any of these products, is to bag it & bin it. i have a draw full of nappy sacks in my bathroom so if either of us use a wipe we pop it in a bag & put it in our bathroom bin. its such an easy thing to do & it saves our sewers & helps the environment.