Please damage the environment

[Grumble]

I had to use a chemical unblocker on my bath this weekend. I guess I do this about twice a year after all the hair and stuff builds to a certain level. On the bottle they advise doing it every week to keep things clear. If everyone actually did this how much more pollution would it cause? Maybe not a lot compared to the litres we get through in a week, would it register?

[Grumble]

There are about 28 million households in the U.K., if we assume that they all have one bath, one basin and one bathroom sink and each of these has a bottle of sodium hypochlorite (the main ingredient) poured down it then we have
28,000,000 x 3 x 0.300 L = 25,200,000 L per week

[Sciolus]

It's said that the most profitable words in the English language are "rinse and repeat".

To answer this question, I think it's unhelpful to multiply up by the population, because you end up comparing mind-bogglingly large numbers against other mind-bogglingly large numbers. Think about it per household. A quick rummage finds water usage is 349 L/day/household (spurious precision much?) or 2400 L/week/household. That seems fairly dilute to me, but it depends how nasty the stuff is and the concentration-effect relationship (is it effectively ignorable at low concentrations?).

[tenchboy]

I would have thought that your local water treatment plant is a very sensitive ecological niche: dependent for its success on the well being of millyons of little coprovores all munching on and digesting whatever goes down your drains; and that anything that you put down the drain that would cause any wider ecological harm would first have to be of such a sufficient concentration to have a noticeable effect on all the scatophagic activity there first.
But I really don't know anything about this at all.

[sTeamTraen]

To answer this question, I think it's unhelpful to multiply up by the population, because you end up comparing mind-bogglingly large numbers against other mind-bogglingly large numbers.

7 billion people each taking a 140g dump per day is a million tons of poo (which is a pleasingly round number if you're not too close to the whole lot). "Humanity produces a billion tons of poo every three years" makes a good OMG story, but we basically manage to cope.

[Bird on a Fire]

I would have thought that your local water treatment plant is a very sensitive ecological niche: dependent for its success on the well being of millyons of little coprovores all munching on and digesting whatever goes down your drains; and that anything that you put down the drain that would cause any wider ecological harm would first have to be of such a sufficient concentration to have a noticeable effect on all the scatophagic activity there first.
But I really don't know anything about this at all.

Don't forget the millions of tons of untreated sewage that get dumped into rivers and coastlines to save water companies money.

A sufficiently diluted alkaline substance is probably far less harmful ecologically than all that nitrogen, to be honest. According to teh wiki:

In spite of its strong biocidal action, sodium hypochlorite per se has limited environmental impact, since the hypochlorite ion rapidly degrades before it can be absorbed by living beings.[54]

However, one major concern arising from sodium hypochlorite use is that it tends to form persistent chlorinated organic compounds, including known carcinogens, that can be absorbed by organisms and enter the food chain. These compounds may be formed during household storage and use as well during industrial use.[34] For example, when household bleach and wastewater were mixed, 1–2% of the available chlorine was observed to form organic compounds.[34] As of 1994, not all the byproducts had been identified, but identified compounds include chloroform and carbon tetrachloride.[34] The estimated exposure to these chemicals from use is estimated to be within occupational exposure limits.[34]

[Bird on a Fire]

I would have thought that your local water treatment plant is a very sensitive ecological niche: dependent for its success on the well being of millyons of little coprovores all munching on and digesting whatever goes down your drains; and that anything that you put down the drain that would cause any wider ecological harm would first have to be of such a sufficient concentration to have a noticeable effect on all the scatophagic activity there first.
But I really don't know anything about this at all.

Don't forget the millions of tons of untreated sewage that get dumped into rivers and coastlines to save water companies money.

A sufficiently drain cleaner is probably far less harmful ecologically than all that nitrogen, to be honest. According to teh wiki:

In spite of its strong biocidal action, sodium hypochlorite per se has limited environmental impact, since the hypochlorite ion rapidly degrades before it can be absorbed by living beings.[54]

However, one major concern arising from sodium hypochlorite use is that it tends to form persistent chlorinated organic compounds, including known carcinogens, that can be absorbed by organisms and enter the food chain. These compounds may be formed during household storage and use as well during industrial use.[34] For example, when household bleach and wastewater were mixed, 1–2% of the available chlorine was observed to form organic compounds.[34] As of 1994, not all the byproducts had been identified, but identified compounds include chloroform and carbon tetrachloride.[34] The estimated exposure to these chemicals from use is estimated to be within occupational exposure limits.[34]

[Martin_B]

I would have thought that your local water treatment plant is a very sensitive ecological niche: dependent for its success on the well being of millyons of little coprovores all munching on and digesting whatever goes down your drains; and that anything that you put down the drain that would cause any wider ecological harm would first have to be of such a sufficient concentration to have a noticeable effect on all the scatophagic activity there first.
But I really don't know anything about this at all.

The half-litre of bleach you pour down the drain (along with everyone else's half-litre) first gets diluted in the pipes with various bath/shower water, toilet flushings and rain run-off. Then water treatment plants have buffer tanks after the initial filters, so there's a huge quantity of water to dilute the bleach in.

The treatment plants also check the chemical make-up of the buffer tanks both constantly (for things like pH levels) and discretely (small samples taken to labs, probably 3-4 times a day). If high levels of something which will affect the bacteria (commonly known as activated sludge!) are detected then they can treatment chemicals they can add to protect the sludge.

I haven't worked on water treatment plants for ~25 years, but they were clever little things even back then.

What you don't want to do is use bleach if you aren't on the mains and have a septic tank. They don't have the dilution available and you can kill them off pretty easily.

[Gfamily]

To answer this question, I think it's unhelpful to multiply up by the population, because you end up comparing mind-bogglingly large numbers against other mind-bogglingly large numbers.

7 billion people each taking a 140g dump per day is a million tons of poo (which is a pleasingly round number if you're not too close to the whole lot). "Humanity produces a billion tons of poo every three years" makes a good OMG story, but we basically manage to cope.

140g a day seems a bit light. Data exhaustively gathered by looking at the top three or four sites in a Google search suggests 300g as a more realistic estimate.

Wasn't one of us doing before-and-after weighings?

[Millennie Al]

There are about 28 million households in the U.K., if we assume that they all have one bath, one basin and one bathroom sink and each of these has a bottle of sodium hypochlorite (the main ingredient) poured down it then we have
28,000,000 x 3 x 0.300 L = 25,200,000 L per week

Why not use sodium hydroxide instead? It has no chlorine

[dyqik]

There's plenty of chlorine in the sea.

[sTeamTraen]

7 billion people each taking a 140g dump per day is a million tons of poo (which is a pleasingly round number if you're not too close to the whole lot). "Humanity produces a billion tons of poo every three years" makes a good OMG story, but we basically manage to cope.

140g a day seems a bit light. Data exhaustively gathered by looking at the top three or four sites in a Google search suggests 300g as a more realistic estimate.

Wasn't one of us doing before-and-after weighings?

By all means feel free to go with "over half a billion tons of poo every year". I always try to be Cconservative about sh.t.