Last month, I had an article about flushable products in this newsletter. Somebody who read that article suggested that I look into ‘fatbergs’. Although I think I have a fairly good vocabulary, I had never heard the word ‘fatberg’ before. A fatberg is a congealed lump of kitchen fat and flushable products. Flushable products are products that manufacturer claims are safe to flush but which do not dissolve in water like toilet paper. Fatbergs have been found in sewer pipes all over the world. They are often round and get bigger as more and more flushable products become incorporated in them, much the same way that a snowball gets bigger as it rolls downhill. Fatbergs can clog up even the biggest sewer pipes. In New York City, a fatberg weighing 10 tons was removed from a sewer pipe. Try to picture that – a hard round ball made up entirely out of kitchen fat and used baby wipes and sanitary napkins and weighing 10 tons. How would you like to have the job of removing something like that from a sewer pipe? Major cities all over the world are spending huge sums of money removing fatbergs from their sewers. Recently, a fatberg the size of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet was removed from a sewer in London! Below is a photo of an 8 ton fatberg that rolled into a turn in a sewer pipe in Sydney, Australia, sealing off the flow of sewage. I have been looking at photos of fatbergs on Google images, and I must admit that some of them look strangely beautiful. Of course, I am looking at them at a distance. I strongly suspect that fatbergs are not as pretty to look at (or smell) up close.
The word ‘flushable’ has no legal definition. Right now, any manufacturer can say that any product is ‘flushable.’ I think Congress should create a legal definition for the word ‘flushable’ just as they did for the words ‘organic’ and ‘gluten-free.’ To repeat what I said last month – never, never flush so-called flushable products.