Humans are gross. We are. You don't even need to see someone's browser history to know it. There's evidence all around us, with just about everything we leave behind.
It's getting harder and harder to ignore it, too. What we send out of sight and should stay out of mind is increasingly coming back to haunt us later. Often in larger, stinkier forms.
Even the Ninja Turtles wouldn't want to battle such a thing. The mammoth, fatty clot was discovered lurking in the sewers beneath the quaint seaside town of Devon.
Now, a few brave British sewer divers have to deal with it.
Or a full seven meters more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It's a monster made up of congealed fat from cooking oil, wet wipes, diapers, food waste, and just about anything sent down the drain or flushed down a toilet that shouldn't be.
"It's the largest discovered in our service history and will take our sewer team around eight weeks to dissect this monster in exceptionally challenging work conditions," South West Water's director of wastewater, Andrew Roantree, told The Independent
Sidmouth Town councillor Paul Wright said "The question that sprung to my mind was when did they last check the sewers? It hasn't grown overnight. It could be absolutely ancient. It could be the oldest fatberg as well as being so long. It's quite incredible."
That unfortunate title goes to a monstrous blockage found beneath the Whitechapel area in east London in 2017. At 250 meters long (820 feet), if stood on its end, it would have qualified as one of the 20 tallest structures in all of the U.K.
It took a mere nine weeks for workers to break up, and its pieces were sent to a recycling plant to be turned into renewable energy.
Well, except for one chunk, which went on display at the Museum of London, because who wouldn't want to check out a stomach-churning blob of soggy waste.
This tweet from South West Water puts it pretty succinctly: Don't flush what shouldn't be flushed, and don't pour cooking oil down the sink.
Or, if you prefer, some areas have companies that will take your congealed cooking oil for recycling into biodiesel. Much better than allowing it to block the sewers!
Sure, those so-called "flushable" wipes go down the toilet, but they don't break up once they get to the sewers. That's how these fatbergs start forming, and they're a costly problem. Thames Water told the BBC that they spend about a million pounds ($1.278 million U.S.) a month breaking up fatbergs.
That huge fatberg under London, all 820 feet of it, turned into about 10,000 liters of biodiesel, enough to run 350 London buses for one day.
