I won't go into much detail here, but you can probably paint the picture in your mind: on a cold, rainy February evening back in 2017, my father-in-law and I were frantically taking turns manning a pair of wet/dry vacuums as we fought to keep a flood contained to a basement room since known as the "sewer closet."

We won the battle and kept the carpet of the adjoining playroom clean and dry, but I lost the larger war, having to call in professional plumbers to clear out our sewer line the next day. The culprit of the backup? Baby wipes. And only a few wipes, mind you — usually, this is a household quite mindful of the advice not to flush wipes, but I had slacked a time or two, and those few fateful flushes were all it took.

Also without going into detail, any parent who has grown used to having baby wipes spread strategically about the house will have learned that there is no law stipulating wipes can only be used for babies. In fact, you rather get used to having them on hand. But regardless of who used them, tossing used wipes into a trashcan where they will linger for days is less than ideal; flushing them and risking a costly (and ghastly) plumbing catastrophe is far worse, not to mention the ethical issue of potentially depositing wipes out into the ocean.