Plop muffling costs lives
The environmental cost of dignity
Ah, young love. Holding hands, pretending to enjoy galleries, actually listening, and inevitably - running the tap while you defecate so your partner doesn’t hear your faeces plopping into water.
In other words:
— Going for tacos = cool and sexy.
— Demonstrating you can aptly digest the tacos = DISGUSTING.
We know air travel and burning coal are bad for the planet, but ‘plop muffling’ has gone completely unchecked.
But what is the environmental cost? I did the maths because nobody else seemed to want to. Correct - not all heroes wear capes.
Rather than using toilet-related images in this post, which would’ve got repetitive - I’ve used public domain photos from the Flickr album ‘City of York Folk Weekend 2018’ by Christine ‘The Lens’ Cockett (she added in that nickname, not me. That’s not to say it isn’t deserved though, as you’ll see…).
1) Who are the ‘plop mufflers’?
Firstly, we need to work out which people are plop muffling. A survey by Britain’s fourth favourite toilet cleaner ‘Bloo’ found that 42% of people run the taps to mask the sound of their plops.1
Easy. Thanks Bloo.
We’ll call this stat ‘Tap-mask prevalence’.
2) When does it occur?
According to a 2017 Relationship Study by Mic, most relationships begin in the “don’t fart yet” phase. It’s a unique time that causes split personality syndrome.
On one side:
- ‘I’m just chill, fun and sexy (and not insane)’
And the other…
- ‘I’m secretly harbouring a ticking time bomb - please get the fuck out of my flat so I can de-evolve to my primordial self and lose a third of my body weight in faeces. Or bare minimum, we’re frog marching to a cafe like it’s some sort of demilitarised zone so I can disarm with minimal casualties.’
According to the survey, guffing becomes more acceptable within two and six months, and nearly everyone by twelve months.2
That seems VERY short to me, but I won’t argue with the data.
We’ll represent in the calculation the variable chances of muffling during the first 12 months using r…
3) How often does the situation arise?
Unless your attachment style is medically bonkers - during the first 12 months of a relationship, couples don’t spend every waking minute in each other’s company. According to Relationships Scotland Report (2022), early couples spend about three nights together3.
That’s about 156 stay-overs a year. We’ll assume only those nights are ‘at risk’ and divide them across the different phases, see below:
Now we multiply each time block by its masking probability and the tap-masking population share. Easy! Right?
The result?
Roughly 34 nervous tap-runs per person per year in the first twelve months of a relationship.
5) How much wasted water is that?
The average UK basin flow is 6 litres per minute.4
We’ll assume 1 minute per “mask” which is very generous but makes up for those who mask using the shower. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE (me).
That’s 203 litres of water, per person, per year.
About three full baths. All sacrificed to save our dignity.
6) Scaling it up
Now we need to work it out on a global scale as the above stuff has been UK-centric (classic main character energy from the Brit).
Not everyone has running water, or a private bathroom. The WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme says ≈58% of people have “safely managed sanitation” - i.e. their own clean, plumbed toilet.5
So let’s combine that with the global adult share ≈ 65% of the population6 and world population 8.23 billion7:
That gives us a final answer (or ‘answr’ as I’m trying to coin) of 0.63 km³ of water, which means…
630 billion litres of water is used a year to plop muffle
That’s the equivalent of:
250,000 Olympic swimming pools of water.
Powering 150,000 homes for a year.⁹
Manufacturing 600 million plastic bottles.
But is it worth it?
In a word… yes.
I do not want my partner to hear my plops, nor them mine.
BURN THE PLANET.
ps: click here for more photos from City of York’s Folk Weekend 2018 by ‘The Lens’.
Bloo Survey (UK, 2020) – 62 % mask toilet noises; 42 % run the tap (Northants Telegraph).
Mic Relationship Study (2017) – Couples comfortable farting after 2–6 months.
Relationships Scotland Report (2022) – Most couples stay 1–3 nights/week pre-cohabitation
Thames Water & Waterwise – Average bathroom tap ≈ 6 L per minute.
WHO/UNICEF JMP (2024) – 57–58 % global safely-managed sanitation coverage.
Population Reference Bureau (2024) – ≈ 65 % of global population aged 15–64.
UN World Population Prospects (2024) – Global population ≈ 8.23 billion.
I am also a fan of the lobby jobby, deployed at hotels. (Ps Thank you for these important water calculations, but the whole tsunami is easily circumvented by keeping a DAB radio in the bathroom)