Plus the environmental pollution, it went somewhere even if they say it was contained in the sewage works, it certainly wasn't recycled.

I remember in the '70s, when I worked at a bakery that backed onto a canal along with three others that did too, the environmental people were trying to discover who dumped a dough mix into the canal. Apparently it had had a blue nylon brush chopped to bits in it (that would have fallen in by accident, which was quite a common cock up), and then dumped into the canal. However it was during the heatwave months of the '70s when the water was quite warm, so the dense dough after sinking to the bottom, fermented quite happily from a dense volume that would fill the back of an estate car, to the aerated volume of a truck which then rose up to the surface and floated down several miles of canal before sticking itself around the lock gates and several small pleasure craft moored up in that area!

They never did find out who was to blame. We've move on quite a bit from the old out of sight, out of mind days.