Does flushable litter clog pipes?

[ocelot41]

Can you settle an argument between DH and I? Would a good quality flushable litter like Oko Plus risk clogging toilet pipes if you only flush the (ahem) lumps?

The only things that are definitely OK to be flushed are poo pee and loopaper. There is no legal bar for companies to print "flushable" on any product. The manufacturer uses the word without even testing to see what damage the stuff may do.

Put a handful of clean loo paper and a handful of clean cat litter into two large bowls of water. Wait 5 minutes then swoosh each around with your hand. The paper should break into tiny fragments and after a little longer will have basically disolved. I know that a "flushable" toddler wipe is still intact and doesn't. What does the cat litter do?

I use Oko but I put the clumps in doggy bags and put them in the public doggy poo bins, flush only the cat poos down the toilet.

I really wouldn't... I bag into dog poo bags and bin

We had to flush litter after grumpy cat's radio iodine treatment for something like a month. It was fine. We used Oko. Still flush from time to time.
In the interest of science I have put some cat litter in a bowl of water and will get back with the result.

So, in the time it took to write the last sentence of my last post the Oko litter has broken down into very small fragments. There seems to be no tendency to clump together.

Thanks all! The outside litter bin is 4 floors away so it is a bit of a PITA. Plus, am a greenie and want to lower my land fill. Plus my Council now only empty bins every two weeks so lowering our landfill is now a practical necessity! Oko is expensive and if it doesn't really allow you to flush, I don't really see the point?

Maybe I should mention it to my local plumber?

Toilet paper under the same conditions, the cat litter is more finely broken down imo.
The only problem that can happen with the flushable stuff is that if you put too much in at once it absorbs a lot of the water in the bowl and doesn't disperse well.

Final result - I can squash the toilet paper back into a solid mass, the cat litter does not stick together at all. I need to get a life.

chemenger the cat litter doesn't seem the be disolving though? The paper pretty much does eventually but if the litter is effectively gravel sitting on the bottom of pipes it is going to cause problems even if it doesn't clump.

Paper doesn't dissolve, it breaks down into fibres, just like the litter, but the litter, in my experiment, broke down much quicker. All I can say is that, in my opinion, the litter breaks down rapidly into a very finely divided low density solid which I can't see causing a problem in a system which is designed to handle much larger solids. There seems to be no tendancy to reform into larger solids, like fat, for example. However I'm (thankfully) not a sewer engineer.
I'm going to be visiting a water treatment plant in the near future, I'll ask them what they think.

Please do chemenger! Ooh the folks you meet on MNet.... Any wildlife experts out there can tell me if cat poo is treated in our sewage - a Google shows its been a problem for sealife off California? I don't want to hurt sea otters!

@achemenger

I'm impressed! I'd thought of doing the same experiment but no need, unless we're going for valid and reliable test results of course

I did wonder about passing the results of dispersing the litter and toilet paper through a sieve to get an idea of how far they had broken down but I thought it was going too far.
Now I have to google about cat poo and sea otters (favourite animals of all).