Bad bathroom habits cause more household friction than most people admit. In a survey of 1,344 U.S. adults commissioned by the Responsible Flushing Alliance (RFA), 38.9% named an unreplaced toilet roll as their top bathroom bugbear, 36.6% pointed to someone simply not flushing, and 35.3% cited hair left in the sink or shower. Further down the list sits the specific habit RFA exists to fix: 13% of respondents said flushing something that shouldn’t have been flushed — like baby wipes, cotton pads, and similar items — has caused friction in their household.
That statistic sits at the centre of RFA’s five-year #FlushSmart campaign, which aims to increase responsible flushing practices through education. This July, as Flush Smart Month returns, RFA’s newest push, Bathroom Bootycamp, makes the same case through a different lens, treating bad flushing habits as something households genuinely argue about, not just a plumbing issue.
“Our goal is to revolutionise public education by keeping it highly engaging, memorable, and fun,” says Lara Wyss, President of the Responsible Flushing Alliance. “We are challenging the public to rethink their everyday habits. Always check wet wipes for the Do Not Flush symbol and disposal instructions, which helps us protect not only the health of our homes and environment, but our relationships, too.”
There’s a real cost behind the campaign’s light tone. Clearing a household clog caused by non-flushable items can cost anywhere from $300 to $15,000 for a full repipe. Nationally, wipes that are not designed to be flushed cost clean water utilities an estimated $441 million a year in additional operating expenses, according to the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA) — a cost that, in the end, is passed back to ratepayers.
What’s Really Going Down America’s Toilets
RFA is a nonprofit focused on changing flushing behaviour across America, largely by explaining the Do Not Flush symbol now required on wipes packaging in seven states. The scale of the problem became clear in the largest sewage collection study of its kind, carried out at two California wastewater treatment facilities. Of the 1,745 items pulled from the system and catalogued, 34.1% were wipes carrying the Do Not Flush label, 53% were paper towels, and 7% were period products. In total, 99% of everything recovered was never designed to be flushed at all. Nearly every Do Not Flush wipe recovered was still fully intact. The handful of genuinely flushable wipes fragments found made up less than 1% of the total, and those were attached to other items and already breaking apart, exactly as they’re engineered to do.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. Around 90% of wet wipes sold in the US — such as cleaning wipes, baby wipes, and make-up remover wipes — are made with long, durable fibres that are not meant to go down the toilet. Non-flushable wipes, whether they are made of plastic or natural fibres, are not designed to break down in water.
Wipes that are designed to break down in water carry the “flushable” label on packaging and make up the other 10% of wet wipes sold in the US. Flushable wipes are made from short, plant-based fibres that are specifically engineered to break apart and disperse like toilet paper. They are typically sold alongside dry toilet paper rather than household cleaning products. They are designed to be a supplement to, or occasional replacement for, toilet paper itself — not a separate category of product.
Much of the remaining confusion isn’t really about wipes at all, it’s about paper. For years, bathroom messaging leaned on a simple “pee, poo and paper” rule of thumb, and RFA’s research suggests some of that shorthand has lingered in the wrong places, feeding an assumption that any soft paper product — like kitchen roll, facial tissue, paper napkins — is fine to flush. It isn’t. The simpler rule RFA wants people to remember instead: Toilet paper, wipes specifically labelled as flushable, and human waste can go down the toilet. Everything else belongs in the trash.
Five Years, One Encouraging Trend Line
Whether the message is landing can be tracked reasonably well. When RFA began surveying California residents in 2021, 69% recognised the Do Not Flush symbol and 58% admitted to having flushed something they knew they shouldn’t. By 2025, national recognition of the symbol had reached 81%, and the share of people nationally still flushing non-flushables had eased from 53% to 50% in a single year alone. In California specifically, where RFA’s education efforts have run longest, self-reported improper flushing has fallen nine points since its earliest tracking, from 58% down to 49%.
“Our Flush Smart month campaigns demonstrate that creative, culturally relevant content can genuinely move the needle on behaviour, not just awareness,” Wyss reflects. “When we see comments like ‘checking labels is so important’ and ‘I had no idea,’ and when we watch those sentiments translate into sustained, measurable declines in improper flushing, we know the work is making a real difference. We’re proud of what this campaign accomplished and energised about what comes next.”
From Clog Monsters to Bootcamps: How the Campaign Has Evolved
If the data has moved steadily, the creative has moved a lot faster. RFA marked its first official Flush Smart Day on 1 July 2022, timed to a new California law (AB 818) requiring non-flushable wipes to carry the Do Not Flush symbol. A year later came the campaign’s breakout moment: a spoof Hollywood movie trailer introducing the Clog Monster, a fictional character built from every wrongly flushed wipe, designed to make checking the label memorable rather than worthy. By 2024, Flush Smart Day had grown into Flush Smart Month, and RFA took the campaign to VidCon Anaheim with a focus on engaging younger audiences, where Detective Vincent Drains and his singing, talking sidekick, a toilet named Mel, led attendees through a film-noir-style “Crimes of Flushing” activation.
Also in 2024, RFA furthered efforts to engage younger audiences by teaming up with the Latino Film Institute’s Youth Cinema Project, which includes students from 14 school districts throughout California, to design and judge a youth PSA filmmaking competition. Participants received a creative brief with specific guidelines for the PSA to educate consumers on smart flushing habits and promote the Do Not Flush symbol. Overall, the expanded reach into new spaces and audiences increased RFA’s cultural relevance, helping make smart flushing part of the broader cultural conversation.
In 2025, the campaign turned to another specific audience: households with children. RFA’s national survey found that 60% of people with children at home had flushed something non-flushable, which led to Potty Training for Grown-ups, a campaign built around family-friendly influencers and the simple, slightly cheeky premise that children were teaching their parents proper flushing habits, not the other way around. That same year, RFA’s advocacy also helped support Michigan’s new wipes labelling law, which took effect in February 2025 after the state’s clean water utilities were found to be paying an estimated $18 million a year in unplanned repair costs caused by non-flushable wipes.
“Clear and well-placed disposal instructions on non-flushable wipes are key to consumer understanding of which categories of wipes should not be flushed,” Wyss says of the Michigan law. “We know from consumer surveys that product packaging is the most trusted place from which people get disposal instructions, making the labelling law an important step in educating people about proper flushing habits.”
Which brings the story to 2026, and Bathroom Bootycamp, arguably RFA’s most ambitious activation yet, combining an interactive online quiz and a seven-day habit-reset challenge with a roster of TikTok and Instagram influencers focused on making better bathroom behaviour easy to talk about.
The Work That’s Still Left to Do
For all the progress, RFA is careful not to declare victory, and the data supports that caution. Roughly half of Americans are still flushing things they know they shouldn’t, at least occasionally. While 48% of U.S. respondents said they felt very knowledgeable of non-flushable products in 2025, 50% still admitted to flushing non-flushable items. It seems that while awareness increases, a gap still persists in responsible flushing behaviours to match. RFA believes that the key to positive behaviour change will be continued creative work to bring the consequences of irresponsible flushing into the cultural conversation. The consequences can be dire, but the fix is simple: Check the packaging for the Do Not Flush symbol and only flush toilet paper, wipes clearly labelled as flushable, and human waste. The rest always goes in the trash, never the toilet.
What Comes Next
None of this has stayed confined to California, where the movement began. Seven states — California, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Colorado, Michigan and New Jersey — now require non-flushable wipes commonly found in the bathroom to carry the Do Not Flush symbol. Federal legislation that is modelled on those laws, called the WIPPES Act, has passed the House and cleared the Senate Commerce Committee, backed by groups including the California Association of Sanitation Agencies (CASA), the National Stewardship Action Council, and NACWA. RFA’s coalition has grown alongside the legislation and now spans more than 25 member companies alongside wastewater agency partners across the country.
The near-term ask, though, stays simple: check the label, and when in doubt, bin it. As Flush Smart Month unfolds through July, that message will be carried by a new round of influencer content and, if the legislative momentum holds, a genuinely national labelling standard within the next year or two. Five years in, the data suggests it is a message that is starting to get through, even if, for many households, there is still work to do.
