What You Should & Should Not Flush Down the Toilet _ One Small Step

What you flush down the toilet matters. You should only flush four things, pee, poop, puke, and toilet paper. That's because everything you put in the toilet ends up at a wastewater treatment facility. And right now they're overwhelmed with wet wipes that are clogging sewers and contain microplastics. Not only that, where your toilet paper comes from matters too. According to the NRDC, major toilet paper brands are clear-cutting forests to give us that super soft toilet paper. So I want to know, can our toilet habits be more sustainable? To find out, I tour a New York City wastewater treatment facility and talk to two startups who are tackling toilet waste in different ways. I'm Lucy Biggers and this is One Small Step. By one estimate, wet wipes are a $2.1 billion industry and they're forecasted to grow to $3.5 billion by 2023. The problem is wet wipes don't break down like toilet paper. That's because almost all of them contain plastics or synthetic fibers. When combined with grease, this leads to masses nicknamed fatbergs that clog city sewers and cost cities like New York and London millions of dollars a year to clear. Mikkel Adgate works at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and she's going to show us the issues they face when cleaning up our bad toilet habits. Oh my god. Wait, so is everything here is wipes? Well, it was originally designed to collect things like branches, twigs, trash and things like that to keep it from going into the wastewater treatment plant. But as you can see, by and large, the vast majority of items that you're seeing appear to be wipes. And as more and more New Yorkers are flushing them down the toilet, essentially treating their toilets like garbage cans, all of that is being collected here. How much is this problem costing the city? We have a very conservative estimate that it's costing us about $19 million a year to deal with wipes and other non-flushable items, but also improper grease disposable. So when you're cooking and you pour that grease down the sink, once it goes into our sewers, it cools and it clogs. Grease clogs in our sewers is the number one reason for sewer backups in the city. And the term fatberg, that term comes from that combination of fats and oils with wipes and other non-disposable items mixing together into these congealed masses that clog sewers, that clog people's pipes and cause problems here. Why can't the wipes break down like toilet paper? Their definition of flushable is something that clears your pipes. Our definition of flushable is something that breaks down quickly into small pieces, and it is made out of material that breaks down in the environment. So the one small step that you can take is to trash your product instead of flushing it. Learning about the fatbergs was very worrisome. I had no idea that wet wipes were such an issue. Now that I know, I want to talk to a startup founder who thinks he's found an alternative. I think it's so cool that you guys have thought of how to rethink the wipe. So what is Foam.co? My wife and I basically love traveling, and we went all over the world. And we'd go to India, and we noticed that there would be like a handheld bidet anywhere you go, right? It kind of expanded our mindset a little bit, thinking outside the box, like dry toilet paper isn't the best way when we came back to America. So we wanted something that was paraben-free. We wanted something that was pH balanced for sensitive skin. We wanted something that was fragrance-free. So that was some of the main criteria we started working towards. And then we also learned that a lot of wet wipes also include alcohol, which can actually strip away some of the good stuff that's on your skin. So we wanted to make sure we avoided that as well. So here's what you do. You basically just set the dispenser on the back of your toilet bowl, and then whenever you need it, all you do is take your existing toilet paper, put it underneath the dispenser, and it emits the same baby wipe cleanser that you find, but directly onto your toilet paper. By using your product, how many wet wipes are we saving? What's the equivalency? Yeah, so this is about 160 uses of wet wipes. And so for every single refill that we sell, it replaces what the equivalent is of about three pounds of solid wet wipe waste that would otherwise be flushed down toilets. Jerry, thank you so much. It was so great to learn about your product. And can I use your bathroom? Yeah, please. I hate that. I hate potty humor. Wet wipes aren't the only problem. The average American uses three rolls of toilet paper every week. Now multiply that by 329 million of us. That's a lot of toilet paper. Since 1996, 28 million acres of Canadian forests have been cut down to source that paper, which is roughly the size of Pennsylvania. That's why I'm excited to sit down with Danny Alexander. He is the co-founder of Who Gives a Crap, a startup that sells sustainably sourced toilet paper. So how did you decide to start Who Gives a Crap? My co-founder actually had the idea. He was looking for an item that everybody uses that he could basically sell and donate half of the profits. And he walks into the bathroom one day and had this classic epiphany moment where he looked at the roll of toilet paper and said, that's it, toilet paper called Who Gives a Crap, and we'll donate half of our profits to help build toilets. Wow. Yeah. Do you know how many toilets you guys have helped build at this point? We've donated about a million and a half dollars to date since we started, and we're hoping to double that this year. And your toilet paper is made out of bamboo and recycled materials. Why did you guys make that choice? 27,000 trees are cut down every single day just to make toilet paper, and we didn't want to be part of that. And so bamboo is a good compromise where it's much better for the planet. The fact that it's a grass is actually great because it regrows on its own. So unlike cutting down trees where you cut it down and that's it, that's the end of the tree, bamboo you can cut down and a few months or a year later you can come back and cut it down and again and again. When you go through and clear cut a forest, you're basically removing all of the habitat for the local wildlife. You're removing all of the carbon offsetting that trees naturally do, removing all of the benefits of that forest for decades. And it's been shown that even when that forest regrows, some of the wildlife never returns. So sad. It's tragic. An acre of bamboo actually produces more oxygen than an acre of regular forest. It requires less energy and less water and less chemicals to turn it into paper. In my opinion, there's really no reason to use traditional toilet paper. The one small step you can take is not wiping with trees anymore. By switching to recycled or bamboo toilet paper, you can stop being part of the 27,000 trees that are cut down every day to make toilet paper. It's one small step that everyone can take that will make a huge difference. Oh, okay. So this is what? This is our premium bamboo line. As you can see, it's wrapped in paper. It's so soft. I give a crap now, so thank you. Awesome. Happy wiping, everybody. Beginning this journey, I truly did not understand that our toilet habits are connected to our greater environment. But now I see our choices in the bathroom really do matter. So here's my one small step. Do not flush anything down the toilet other than toilet paper. And when you're picking that toilet paper, make sure it comes from a sustainable source like recycled or bamboo. That's all for this week's episode of One Small Step. Thank you so much for watching. If you liked it, please hit subscribe and we'll see you next time.