When Englishman Thomas Crapper developed the flushing toilet in 1836 the world was saved from the era of an outdoors "Thunderbox " and the weekly council service to remove the pan and what was termed "night soil ". The days of indoor plumbing had arrived.
Every city, town and village now boasts a sewer that is connected to homes and commercial buildings. It is not something we think about and it is generally taken for granted, and yet putting it in place and maintaining it is probably one of the greatest cost factors in municipal budgets. Once raw sewage was simply pumped into a nearby river or into the ocean in coastal areas, but now it requires costly treatment and this involves mega-millions spent on treatment plants.
We live in an ever changing world and sometimes it is small changes that wreak the most profound complications to the status quo. This past century saw the arrival of aeroplanes, television and the computer, and the automobile moved from a cranky contraption to a reliable means of transport, but it seems that a very small change in human behaviour seems capable of turning back the clock to an earlier age.
Along with indoor plumbing came an innovation that could be said to have gone "hand in hand " with the modern toilet - and that was toilet paper. The paper industry developed what was called " tissue " and this was specifically created to break down to it's basic components when saturated with water. It became synonymous with bathroom fittings and a roll of this paper sat beside each toilet.
Later in that past century the constant surge of innovation delivered the disposable nappy to make child rearing easier and together with that innovative minds created another marvel that Mum's found very handy - a "wet wipe " that enhanced a nappy change when travelling or the facilities of the home bathroom were not available. It was envisaged that both the disposable nappy and the wet wipe would not be flushed down the toilet.
Of course this wet wipe was entirely different to toilet paper. It was designed from a type of paper fabric treated to not disintegrate when wet, and this is where a huge problem began to arise when adult humans chose to use it themselves in place of toilet paper.
Multi billions have been spent on sewerage treatment. The process relies on the toilet paper being dispersed to it's components by agitation and then treated in multiple processes until what emerges from the plant is safe to use for farm irrigation or is contamination free for disposal in rivers or the ocean.
The ever increasing wet wipe concentration coming through our sewers is preventing this process taking place. Councils are finding that the plant digestors are being clogged with great balls of the stuff and they often snag and block the mains carrying sewage from the suburbs to central processing plants. Excavating roadways and digging out this blockage with mechanical handling equipment is costly and time consuming. There is a very real chance that our sewage systems will fail unless this problem can be overcome.
That is easier said than done. It will be very hard to change the decisions that humans make in the privacy of their own bathrooms and yet this preference could be disastrous if it is not reversed. It is possible the paper industry may be induced to create something that delivers both the characteristics of a wet wipe and yet reverts to disintegration in water after a period of time. It is possible that industry may develop a new chemical which - when added to sewage - helps break down wet wipes, but at the moment such a cure is nowhere apparent.
Pity the maintenance crews who have the unpleasant task of dealing with this problem. Digging it out would probably rate as one of the most unpleasant tasks of this twenty-first century !
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