How are fats, oils, and grease getting into the sewer system, though? Are there enough of those materials left in our poop to conglomerate like that? Or are those from industrial users on the sewer system?
Man, I’m an idiot. I dunno why I forgot for a moment that other drains exist lol. That makes sense, thanks!
Maybe you have a drain phobia? Mr. Rogers had a song one day on his show called “you can never go down the drain” which was supposed to stop kids who were scared of that happening… but until he sang that song, the concept of me going down a drain was not something I had considered, so I was terrified of it for years and had to jump out of the bath the minute my mom pulled the plug.
On the other hand, you’re probably not as weird as I am, so you probably just forgot.
Lots of restaurants and cafes pouring their waste cooking oil down the sink instead of paying a collection service.
Flushable wipes are not flushable! These companies should pay to remove them, it was completely false advertising
Well, they are flushable, they just don’t decompose. But they flush! But so does my sock.
Decomposition is irrelevant. Nothing you flush decomposes by the time it gets to treatment (or the ocean / fuck the environment amirite). The main problem with these wipes is they don’t even break apart. Their little sabotage trojan horses that corporations injected into out sanitization systems, and we continue to let them falsely advertise, instead of fining them for ALL the damages they cause.
Put officers Minogue and O’Leary on it
Here’s how you fix this. We’re going to dig up the streets and replace the sewers. The new sewers will be all steel. There’s going to be flame throwers, and spiders inside.
Then, whenever one of these fatbergs exists, we’ll just blast the flame throwers, and it’ll burn it to nothing.
Problem solved.
Sadly this is pretty common. Here are some nasty pictures from a recent one in greater Vancouver.
I watched a video years ago where poor street cooks in SE Asia were “mining” cooking oil out of the sewer. They would refine it and use it to cook food.
Edit: It was China. I think I found the exact video, but it turns out there are a lot of similar videos!
Fun fact from the video: it’s estimated that 10% of cooking oil in China is “gutter oil”.
