When you brush your hair, what do you do with the hair that you shed? If you or your child has long hair, maybe you pull the hairs from the brush and chuck them in the loo. It’s easier than trying to get them into a pedal bin, right?
Then there are haircuts. Some households who switched to home haircuts during the pandemic haven’t looked back. Every six weeks, the electric clippers gets charged up and everyone gets a short back and sides. Manscaping is all the rage now too of course and maybe the hirsute in your household are giving themselves a regular mow.
What are we doing with all the hair? Do you put it in the bin or flush it down the loo? Hair is natural, it can hardly be an environmental hazard?
Hair is natural all right, but it shouldn’t be flushed down the toilet, according to Uisce Éireann.
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You shouldn’t put dental floss in the toilet either because, like hair, it can wrap itself around other objects in the pipeline when flushed, making blockages bigger. Hair does the same.
Material like this can also cause damage to machinery in wastewater-treatment plants.
If you’re having breakfast, skip this bit – hair flushed down the toilet can form giant balls that trap odours and cause blockages. The block might mean your loo overflows and it’s off-limits for a bit. Yikes.
If the blockage is on “the private side”, which is what Uisce Eireann calls the waste water pipes that belong to your house before they connect to the wider pipe network, you’ll need to deal with it yourself.
Put on some heavy duty rubber gloves and do your best with a plunger, no one’s idea of fun. You might have to hire some drain unblocker people to clear it. Call-out charges, out-of-hours fees and unblocking charges – before you know it, the bill is €300.
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Apart from the cost, there’s the publicity of the thing. The drain guys usually come in a brightly coloured van with jaunty writing that says: “Blocked your toilet? We can help!” It may as well have a loud ice-cream van jingle.
Neighbours’ curtains twitch as they try to piece together what’s going on with your toilet, and what your blockage might mean for them.
If the blockage happens further down the pipeline in the public drain system, Uisce Éireann deals with it. This can lead to wastewater overflows in your neighbourhood which are seriously smelly and downright gross.
A survey with more than 1,000 people by Think Before You Flush, an awareness campaign by An Taisce’s Clean Coasts programme and Uisce Éireann, sought to find out more about Irish people’s flushing behaviour. It revealed the 12 most common sewage-related litter items we flush down the toilet in error. They call them “the Dirty Dozen”.
The offenders include wipes, cotton buds, cotton wool, medication, plasters, nappies, dental floss – and hair. The three Ps – pee, poo and toilet paper – can shuttle through the sewer network and into your local wastewater-treatment plant no problem. Not so much the dirty dozen, which includes wipes that claim to be flushable.
Flush the wrong things and you risk blockages in your household plumbing, in our wastewater network and littering of our marine environment.
The next time you’ve got yourself some hair, put it in the bin.