Clean flushable wipes not so clean after they’re flushed
Flushable wet wipes. We’ve all seen them in the grocery store. Many of them advertise themselves as a flushable, sewer friendly option to get that extra clean feeling after using the toilet. But according to many city sewer and sanitation workers, they’re anything but clean.
“They’re essentially cloth. So they don’t break down in waste water stream,” said John Millar, the public works director for Rexburg. “They’re a real mess for us. They’re added maintenance, added cost, and added potential for lines plugging.”
The problems are many. First, many city treatment plants aren’t built to handle the heavier load caused by the flushable wipes. Second, even cities that have invested to handle the increase are seeing problems on the way to the treatment plant.
“We have potential for those hanging up, and once they start to hang up, they collect more and more,” said Millar. “They have potential to plug the lines. We’ve had some sewer lines plug because of these.”
Cities all over the country and around the world are facing a similar problem. Idaho Falls said they’ve seen an increased maintenance load due to the increasing popularity of the wipes. In 2015, a city in Minnesota filed a class-action lawsuit against the makers of the flushable wet wipes saying they don’t break down as advertised.
Here at Local News 8/Eyewitness news, we decided to perform our own experiment comparing the flushable wet wipes to traditional toilet paper. We filled two plastic containers with water and placed 10 squares of traditional toilet paper in the first container, and a single flushable wet wipe in the other. Each product sat in it’s container for 30 minutes with four sessions of shaking for 10 seconds: Once at the beginning, twice during, and once at the end.
By the end of the experiment, the traditional toilet paper was mostly disintegrated and barely qualified as a solid. The flushable wipe on the other hand, was still a solid sheet and actually required tension to break it apart. Our experiment definitely doesn’t qualify as scientifically rigorous, but it did show how traditional toilet paper breaks up much easier than the flushable wet wipes.
Millar said it’s going to take legislative action to redefine what “flushable” and “biodegradable” mean before they see any major changes. In the meantime, he encourages people to throw the wipes in the trash. “Still it’s a bit of a problem, but we handle solid waste that way,” said Millar.
