Things That Should Never Go Down the Drain

It’s so easy to deliberately—or accidentally—rinse leftovers and waste down the drain while cooking. Whoosh, off they go. A wonderfully convenient solution, until your pipes become clogged and everything comes back up.

Which leftovers and other foods should you never rinse down the drain?

All types of fat

This includes olive oil, salad dressings, mayonnaise, bacon fat, cooking oil, gravy, butter, margarine and anything else that solidifies when it cools or sits for a while. Oil mixes with other muck and becomes downright disgusting; butter and gravy solidify and repel water. Not exactly ideal in a water pipe.

Eggshells

Small pieces of eggshell can cover the nasty muck mentioned above, preventing a pipe from flushing properly. They are hard, too, so they are difficult to flush down anyway. You can use them well as part of your compost.

Coffee grounds

Because coffee grounds are designed to let water seep through slowly (otherwise you would end up with extremely watery coffee), they are not suitable for flushing down the drain. If they then also mix with solidified fats, you have a real problem. Coffee grounds are also suitable for compost.

Pasta and rice

The starch in both rice and pasta expands the longer it sits in water. Rice in particular soaks up plenty of water. This way, they can easily clog a drainpipe—and you definitely don’t want that.

Flour

Mix flour and water together and what do you get…? Exactly, a kind of glue. You obviously don’t want that in your drainpipe. So don’t rinse flour-covered dishes clean; throw the flour in the trash instead.