Why can't they invent toilet paper that slowly disintegrates when wet?

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JaanTaam

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Jul 31, 2025
I blocked my toilet again. So what now do I wait or do I push a cane down there hoping to poke a hole in it and hope for a vacuum to suck it all down or do I put on a glove and just get down to the nasty work of manually pulling out all the poopy TP? It's been days.
 
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Toilet paper kind of does this already. Cellulose is readily consumed by microbes as it's basically just long chains of sugar. Lots of small invertebrates actually eat rotting wood and the like purely to feed microbes in their guts that they then digest. The better solution is to put some kind of animal that'll live happily in sewers and septic tanks to break down toilet paper and speed up that process of breaking it into just CO2 and what not.
 
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Yugica said:
Toilet paper kind of does this already. Cellulose is readily consumed by microbes as it's basically just long chains of sugar. Lots of small invertebrates actually eat rotting wood and the like purely to feed microbes in their guts that they then digest. The better solution is to put some kind of animal that'll live happily in sewers and septic tanks to break down toilet paper and speed up that process of breaking it into just CO2 and what not.
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How long will this take then? Is there anything I can put down there to speed up the process? Boiling water from the kettle?
 
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JaanTaam said:
How long will this take then? Is there anything I can put down there to speed up the process? Boiling water from the kettle?
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Just call a plumber if using a plunger didn't work. Putting boiling water down your pipes isn't a good idea, especially if you have PVC pipes as the boiling water will soften them. An alternative is drain cleaner(sodium hydroxide or lye), but that doesn't work so well on paper and it's better at dissolving hair instead.

The time it takes to break down a handful of napkins in the aquarium I keep with snails and worms that eat paper is like 3-4 weeks, so the usecase for having animals in your pipes is more about keeping them free of small bits of debris or in the case of a septic tank increasing how long it would be before needing to empty it.
 
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a plunger will work if it is clogged, they use them for a reason.
i have one of these big ones and it has never let me down.
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code123 said:
a plunger will work if it is clogged, they use them for a reason.
i have one of these big ones and it has never let me down.
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See, this is a pro-level toilet plunger. If you go into a house and they have one of the old shitty ones that look like a half cylinder on the end of a stick you know they aren't serious about efficiency or contingency. I'm not saying you should cut them out of your life right away, but it's definitely a point against them as people.

Maybe OP lives in a third world country though, so that sort of bathroom tech might not be available.
 
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