Super: FLUSHability

Narrator: You flush products daily without thinking a lot about it, but thankfully, someone does. Environmental scientists at Procter & Gamble want to understand everything that happens to flushable products after they are used. This helps us make sure that products like Charmin® are acceptable for all of the plumbing systems the products might encounter.

Modern plumbing has greatly enhanced our lives, and we hope in this video to share some of our fascination with this technology.

Let’s start with what happens to products after you flush them. First, the waste water goes to drain lines under the floors of your house and your yard. The drain lines are set at a downward slope so that gravity carries the waste away from your home.

The lines empty into sewer lines that take the waste water to a municipal treatment plant. Or in some homes, the drain lines empty into an onsite treatment system, such as a septic tank. And there are special cases where pumps are needed to move the waste water because the flow is uphill.

Flushable products need to be evaluated for compatibility with all of these components: toilets, drain lines, pumps, septic tanks, and municipal treatment plants.

Now that we know where flushable products go when they are flushed, let’s find out more about how they are tested for acceptability in these systems. This is Procter & Gamble’s global flushability lab in Cincinnati, Ohio, where our flushable products are tested.