Plumbing Threatened By Stuff
The famed FatBerg of London was noted for its size, and the fact that it could have been avoided if people were not flushing fats and other stuff down the drain, including disposable wipes, hair, and used cooking greases that managed to congeal in one spot and block up sewers. Note that in an extreme case this kind of blockage could turn drains into fountains of sewage, and you could have everything in your house wrecked by such an event.
What Trash Cans Are For
Finally, there is something so weird, gross, and true that everyone is going to be talking about it.
Why plumbers make big dollars
A fatberg is possibly one of the grossest things you can encounter in the first world, thanks to our advanced sewage and refuse collection systems, plus the fact that we use a lot of different products for natural functions, and in a twist it turns out that we pour a lot of things down the drain when we aren't consuming too much of them. As the news sources state, fatbergs consist of assorted fats and oils combining in a congealed mass with sanitary products that should not be flushed, on top of baby wipes that should also not be flushed down the toilet. Because these things do not break down in the same manner as bathroom tissue, they can create clogs in regular plumbing, but when they collect in bigger sewage systems the real fun begins.
The Famed Fatberg of London is said to be 15 tons (or tonnes, which could be more for all we Yanks know about the metric system, compared to folks in the UK who still measure things in "Stone" and "Farthings.) It would probably take a detailed stratigraphic study to ascertain the age of such a large fatberg, but then again it may just be created by drainage circumstances that do not allow for masses to get moved to the processing facility. Certainly people aren't having too much fun clearing these items out of the drains already, and they could be clogging up pumps and vessels that aren't designed for synthetic materials mixed with cooking waste. (Of course, if you really want to up the Gross factor, there are places in the Orient where people recycle the stuff in ditches, which contains all this and more, and make it back into cooking oil, including all the poisons found in the drainage ditches and channels of such large cities which also add a tinge of extra-thick air. When you hear of things called Fatbergs, you may want to stop a moment and give thanks to the intrepid women and men who enter the subterranean tunnels to fight such monsters, blast them with fire hoses and crazy contraptions, and spend up to 10 days breaking them apart so they don't back up your plumbing. Many of us don't take the proper amount of time to notice that things actually go down the drain when we flush, instead of having brown fountains of waste spewing from our commodes, shower drains, and sinks. The next time you think these people are getting paid too much money, ask to follow one around on any given day, and see if you can stomach the work. (If so, you may have a career opportunity that will pay well, but won't get you invited to too many cocktail parties.)