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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]LMAO People on DCUM so frequently fail to thoroughly read the OP and consider more than their own narrow circumstances, that I was going to write an annoyed comment that said, basically, "Absolutely the OP shouldn't be flushing applicators and wrappers, but why is everyone assuming she's flushing plastic?! Paper and cardboard exist?!"

Then I thought to double-check the OP and sure enough, she says it right there. I have become what I hate.

Anyway.

I will admit that for some time, I didn't really realize that the cardboard and paper and tampon itself shouldn't be flushed. I wasn't being lazy, it had just escaped me somehow, except for when I'd visit, like, a historic home and they'd have a million warning signs about the old plumbing. I don't know how I failed to grasp this-- it helped that I lived almost exclusively in newish apartment buildings from 18-30 or so, when I realized I had been doing it horribly, horribly wrong. Can't remember how I learned it, but it wasn't because I ever clogged the plumbing (at least not immediately, because I never knew). Because I lived in spaces with strong-- and shared-- plumbing, it just never came back to bite me. I guess I was lucky it also never did when I was visiting someone's home or whatever. I feel terrible about it now!

For the past ~15 years, I have done the right thing and thrown everything away. I feel I should also make penance somehow. Maybe donate money to help build better sanitation systems in other countries.

It definitely never occurred to me it would be okay to flush anything plastic, though.[/quote]

I'm still wondering how I didn't realize this for so many years, though. I'm going to say that my mom never mentioned it because she doesn't use tampons, then I never had female roommates and got married-- to a man-- when I was barely out of my teens, so it just didn't have that much chance to come up? Plus the availability of this kind of Internet conversation/info was lower until 15-20 years ago.

Yes, now I notice the warnings that sometimes appear in public bathrooms, but I think I used to interpret them to apply to plastic, because:

1) people are always saying stuff like "if it didn't come out of your body, don't flush it," and obviously a tampon isn't [i]produced[/i] by your body, but it does come out of it, and I think I thought throwing the tampon away would be a health hazard for other people who emptied the trash? Not defending it, just saying there was a sort of logic to it....

and

2) The paper wrapper really is more or less as flimsy as toilet paper and the cardboard applicator is sturdier, but you do see it start to fall apart pretty quickly, so I must have just assumed it was fine enough. [/quote]

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