At the University of Southern Maine in Portland, whenever nature calls, the toilets answer back.

Stickers posted above toilets around campus say, “I’m not a trash can! The garbage you flush could end up in the ocean.”

The students who put the stickers there hope to warn a captive audience about the damage caused by flushing trash – from bottles of prescriptions drugs to disposable wipes. It’s a problem that clogs sewer pump stations, litters beaches with syringes, pill bottles and other trash and injects medications such as mood-stabilizers and hormones into drinking water supplies.

“I never even thought about that,” said Michael “Adam” Royer, a sophomore criminology major from Falmouth and one of USM’s toilet police. “I figured it all went to a sewer plant and they took everything out. I had no idea that what you flush goes directly out into the ocean when we get a lot of rain.”

Rain can flood sewer systems with stormwater, forcing untreated sewage to spill out of overflow pipes into Casco Bay and other waterways.

And even when it doesn’t rain and the sewage makes it to treatment plants that remove the trash, pharmaceuticals and other chemicals flow right out the other end. “Prescription drugs are a huge problem because people don’t want them in their house (and) they just flush them down the toilet,” Royer said.

Royer and other students learned about sewer overflows, pharmaceuticals and marine debris as part of a project for a criminology class called Crimes Against the Environment.

Sandra Wachholz, the professor behind the idea, is a local expert on things that get flushed into Casco Bay.

Wachholz regularly collects trash along the shoreline of Back Cove, home of some of the city’s sewer overflow discharges. She finds wipes, plastics of all variety, pill bottles and syringes, which she thinks are flushed after being used for insulin injections.

The connection between sewage and criminal justice is based in part on the legal system in Sweden, where Wachholz has taken students to study the legal system. “They have an environmental court, prosecutors and police,” she said.

They also have stickers on or around their public toilets that warn against flushing trash.

Students in the class have made presentations about indiscriminate flushing, but the stickers are a natural way to spread the word. Anyone who spends any time on campus will eventually get the message.

“To have 10,000 students passing through and using those bathrooms is just this extraordinary opportunity to raise awareness about this,” Wachholz said.

The Portland Water District, which has the dirty and costly job of repairing clogged pump stations, printed the talking toilet stickers for Wachholz and her students.

Royer, who plans to go to law school, is glad his eyes have been opened to the indelicate issue of overflowing sewers, although he doesn’t look the same way at beach litter. “It’s kind of gross when you think about it.”

That’s probably a big reason people don’t think before they flush. Except in the bathrooms at USM.

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