If you can’t flush them, why are they called “flushable”?
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Toilet paper breaks down primarily because of water. You have probably already noticed that if you soak most paper in water, it falls apart. This is good for toilet paper because there are all sorts of pumps and machines between your house and leaving the treatment facility that can only handle paper that’s already dissolving in the water and fecal matter, which is mostly pretty soft especially after being soaked in water and mashed up by pumps along the way. Toilet paper is designed to be even more flimsy and able to break up and dissolve in water.
You may also notice that wet wipes are…wet. Despite that, they do not fall apart like normal paper. That is bad for your pipes and those pumps because instead of very soft paper goop it’s a fibrous web that likes to shred into longer strings that get tangled in pumps, caught on debris and imperfections in pipes, and accumulate additional gunk that does not dissolve in water. Chief among that gunk is fats and oils. Fats and oils aren’t great for *any* sewer system at any time, but without something to stick to they mostly just flow through and get filtered out. The fibrous, webby mass of a “flushable” wipes gives the fats and oils a great place to stick to, though, which invites more and more to clump together until you get a [fatberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatberg) which solidifies into a solid mass clogging up the major arteries of the sewer system and breaking pumps that keep the sewage flowing.
They’re called “flushable” because the manufacturers are liars that want your money. It’s that straightforward. You *can* flush them, physically. You are able to put them into your toilet and then flush the toilet and then the flushable wipes will be gone and not your problem anymore, probably – unless you’re on a septic tank, or they get caught inside your home’s plumbing, or they clog the sewer close enough that it backs up into your home. So it’s “””flushable””” in a literal sense, making the manufacturers not *technically* liars in a specifically legally actionable sense of the word. But they are still liars in the “spirit of the law” sense. That’s it.
NOTE: This all also applies to very thick, soft toilet paper. Although it will probably break down better than wet wipes, all that thick 10 ply softness takes long enough to break down that it can clog up pipes and develop into fatbergs as well. A lot of them also include cotton fibers which will not dissolve at all.
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