ON Culture Night, Friday September 17th, in Limerick City Think Before You Flush will present ‘Sanitation in the City.’ A walking tour looking at life in a different time and a different way.
This walking tour will bring participants back in time to a Limerick of the late 1800’s when tenements lined the city streets and due to the lack of basic water and sanitation disease was rampant and the streets often acted like open sewers. Not a pretty picture.
While you won’t need to mind your step on this tour we will walk and talk about the lives of people living in those times, where preventable diseases proved fatal due to the lack of basic sanitation and water, services we thankfully take for granted these days. We will reflect on those times. We will also look at the impact we have in our own convenience driven lives on the local environment, mainly it’s waterways. This tour will be fun and interactive and is an alternative way to walk through the great city of Limerick.
Why must you #ThinkB4UFlush?
Think Before You Flush is a public awareness campaign operated by Clean Coasts in partnership with Irish Water, addressing the issue of flushing unsuitable down the toilet. Unlike toilet paper, which is designed to disintegrate quickly in our pipes and sewage systems, the synthetic materials in items like wipes, cotton buds and sanitary products makes them very strong and unable to break down and possibly leading them to end up in the waterways and on our beaches. Almost 2,000 blockages occur in the Irish wastewater network every month, 75% of which are caused by wipes. Raising awareness of this issue reduces the number of blockages created by this behaviour.
Our actions at home can have an impact on our waterways and coastline and they are something we need to protect as they cannot protect themselves.
Speaking about the campaign Elaine from Clean Coasts, said: “The Think Before You Flush message is simple, only flush the 3 P’s, pee, poo and paper, everything else belongs in the bin. We are always looking for new ways to spread this message so this year we teamed with Culture Night to talk about Think Before You Flush in a new way. This is a new and fun means for us and our audience to think about life without sanitation and water and how in all our lives need to respect the services we have and see the impact we can have on our waterways from our own bathrooms.”
Irish Water’s Richard Ó hEadhra said; “We are delighted to be a part of the Culture Night festivities. We are always looking for opportunities to educate and inform the general public on what not to flush down the toilet. Anything other than the three p’s, poo, pee and paper, has the potential to cause our infrastructure a massive problem by way of blockages. We hope everyone enjoys the walk and will think before they flush as well”
Join the campaign at www.thinkbeforeyouflush.org
