On a pale-blue Sunday morning on the foreshore of the River Thames, 40 people are searching for what others have tried to lose. Dotted across a 250-metre stretch under Hammersmith Bridge, they are combing through layers of silt, seashells and dirty driftwood to find one of the river’s most stubborn problems: wet wipes.
“People come and walk here and it looks just like mud, at a distance,” says the organiser, Dr Felicity Rhodes. “And then you get closer in and see.”
The dig forms part a citizen science project that has tracked sanitary litter on the banks of the Thames for nearly a decade. Set up by the environmental charity Thames21, volunteers are recruited to help map out the amount of wipes that are flushed down the toilet and washed up along the river. Findings are added to a database that quantifies plastic pollution on the banks of the Thames.
Hmm, I used those napkins just 5-10 times in my life, so never checked but I thought they are made of cotton and soaked with alcohol. It isn’t so?
Mostly plastic fibers. They almost never break down.
…i just looked it up. yeah quite a lot of baby wipes are just plastic at the end of the day 🙃
In any case, they dont break down fast enough in the sewage system and that causes all kinds of problems.
https://www.consumerreports.org/home-garden/are-flushable-wipes-really-flushable-a1736074350/
All kinds of things are marketed as biodegradable, but that doesn’t mean it’s biodegradable in the context in which it’s used - the article above for example notes that many wet wipes break down in compost but not water.
yeah, for a thing to actually be flushable, it has to pretty much fall apart instantly on contact with water. like toilet paper. anything else will just lead to terrible clogs. or go through and end up on the riverbank i guess.