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Comment by agurk | Hacker News Reader

I've read about these problems many times, and the official response always seems to be to encourage people not to flush them. I've not seen any numbers, but as these articles continue it hasn't yet fixed the problem.

There also doesn't seem to been an increase in the number of available bins in toilets, certainly in fatberg affected London. Perhaps a campaign for more bins in public spaces (including offices) would be a start.

Judging by comments from people who use them they'd be resistant to going back to dry wiping. Another option would be a campaign to install bidets like in Japan or hand water jets like Finland to provide better cleaning without the wipes.

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A better start IMHO would be to ban selling those things altogether unless they don't contain plastic or other water contaminants. It's serious enough of an issue that most drinking water contains plastic nowadays.

  Another option would be a campaign to install bidets

That would be nice. I hate having to use public restrooms due to lack of bidet.

I have one in my home but don't understand using one in a public setting. That seems unsanitary to me.

You probably have a standalone traditional bidet adjacent to your toilet. I agree, that probably wouldn't be sanitary in a public toilet. People would use the bidet as a toilet and the stream of water would be contaminated.

I think most people today are referring to the toilet seat attachment style bidet when they say bidet. The kind big tech companies like Google have been known to install on their office toilets.

Those seem more likely to be sanitary in a public toilet, but I also think they're likely to be vandalized and broken/stolen.

No, mine is an attachment that fits under the seat. My concern is simply that you have a nozzle spraying water onto your body, and you don't have a way to trust that nozzle is clean. At home, you can trust that, or if you don't you can clean it.

Or even a subsidy for bidets, since that would cut down the use of wipes.

Grab paper towels before going in, wet them with the faucet and boom. You have wet wipes. Just try to tear the paper towels in half before using them and you should be fine.

Paper towels aren't any better than "flushable" wipes.

Paper towels are not flushable!

A lot of these are being flushed from private toilets, fwiw.

Bidets work way better than the wipes.

Yeah, if we collectively stopped using barbarian toilets and got with the bidet program already this would be a non-issue.

Dry wiping not going to do it, difference is night and day. Bidet is the best option. BUT, cities can force manufacturers, one way or another, to design a truly flush-able version.

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