The dispute began in the mid-2000s, as flushable wipes began to take up more shelf space in stores and sewers across North America started clogging more often. Rob Villee, then executive director of the Plainfield Area Regional Sewerage Agency in New Jersey, recalls swapping stories of clogs and fatbergs with representatives from the National Association of Clean Water Agencies starting around 2010. “This became an issue that was being brought up by our members,” he says. “It was an emerging concern for everybody.” Villee, who is now retired but says he’s become known in the wastewater industry as “lord of the wipes” for his research and advocacy on this topic, often works with Joksimovic and Orr, and also with Frank Dick, the industrial pre-treatment coordinator for the city of Vancouver, Washington. Around the same time Villee began encountering problems in New Jersey, sewer pumps in Vancouver began jamming up every few days. Dick, who was new to the industry at the time, asked veteran colleagues if this was normal. “They had not seen this before,” he recalls, adding that feminine hygiene products, paper towels, and greases had often made their way into sewers in the past, but “generally they didn’t cause the problems we see now.” Early on, wastewater and industry groups worked together to find a process to assess flushability, aiming for an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard. “We could not come to an agreement,” says Orr. In 2008, INDA and its international affiliate released its first testing protocol, called GD1, which the wastewater industry quickly criticized as far too easy to pass — and concerns continued with the next iterations. The GD4 came out in 2018, around the time the international flushability group finalized its own guidelines. The details differed, particularly with the slosh box test. The manufacturers’ GD4 stipulates half the amount of water, double the agitation time, and one-and-a-half times the speed as the IWSFG’s specifications. “This is not what sewers are like,” says Orr. Rousse of INDA disagrees. The slosh box “is not meant to emulate any condition because a sewer system has no fixed condition,” he says. “If anybody can define what a typical sewer system dynamic is, that would be challenging because they vary all over the world.” The GD4 also uses a smaller sieve and a rinse of two minutes instead of one, and considers a product to be flushable when 60 percent of it passes through the sieve, compared to the wastewater industry’s 95 percent threshold. David Powling, a technical leader at Kimberly-Clark, says the IWSFG’s rules are stringent to a fault, even failing some ordinary toilet papers. To bolster their claims that flushable wipes cause little harm in sewers, INDA and its members cite a 2016 study that collected debris from screens at two wastewater treatment facilities in New York City on a single day. It found that just over 1 percent came from flushable wipes, while 29.1 percent came from baby wipes. And earlier this year, Powling worked with the utilities provider for Jacksonville, Florida, on a similar one-day-collection study. It found flushable wipes made up only 1 percent of the debris found on screens near a wastewater treatment plant, while baby wipes comprised 37 percent. Joksimovic points to flaws in both studies. Rain the night before the test in New York flushed the sewer system and likely distorted results, he says, and collecting samples in both cities near treatment plants, which are near the end of a sewer system, does not offer a full picture. “Wipes are not only causing problems at the downstream end, there are problems all the way,” he says. Joksimovic and others would like to see more collections on repeated days in different locations, and have them conducted by independent researchers. Wastewater professionals point to a 2017 U.K. study that compared the composition of blockages taken from multiple sites and concluded that baby wipes made up 75 percent of identifiable debris, and other kinds of wipes and feminine hygiene products 20 percent. They also cite a 2017 German study that collected solids from two points in the Berlin sewer system over a year and found that only 14 percent of the debris came from wipes, though it didn’t distinguish the type. In 2016, Dick conducted a study in Vancouver that entailed tagging individual products with pink duct tape and retrieving them later in the sewer system. He ran the test six times in different parts of city, and the results showed that while most brands of toilet paper disintegrated (some of the ones branded “extra strong” fared poorly), every brand of bathroom wipes other than Cottonelle did not, with some of them arriving at treatment plants nearly unchanged from when they came out of the package. Beyond the disagreement over what is truly flushable and what’s not, there is quibbling about product labeling. INDA issued voluntary labeling guidelines in 2017, but wastewater professionals say manufacturers don’t use “do not flush” logos often or prominently enough on their packaging. The Ryerson study of 101 items found 33 percent were labeled flushable. Of those that were not, 33 percent told consumers “do not flush” somewhere on the package while 25 percent used the “do not flush” symbol. But none followed INDA’s own rules for placing that logo in the appropriate location on the package, in a contrasting color, or in a large enough size. Earlier this year, Orr did a separate study of 25 products, 22 of which did not meet INDA’s own standard of flushability, yet only eight were labeled do not flush, and none of those labels were in compliance with the code of practice. “No one is obeying the rules,” says Orr. Rousse of INDA suggested that it’s a hard thing to track. “We don’t have a mechanism to police this,” he said. “What we do know is the majority of the major brands are largely in compliance.” Meanwhile, companies aren’t required to list the materials used to make wipes on the package. Most baby wipes contain plastic, for example. Most bathroom wipes, in contrast, do not — but they often contain synthetics like rayon. “None of the packaging says that these baby wipes are made out of plastics or synthetic fibers,” says Villee, the former sewer agency director in New Jersey. He notes that the European Union is targeting plastic-containing baby wipes as a single-use plastic and may soon require labeling. Both sides agree on one thing: The public needs to better respect sewers and toss disposable products in the garbage instead of the toilet. Municipalities are working to this end, with programs such as New York City’s $2 million “Trash It. Don’t Flush It” public awareness campaign. As for the overall conflict over which wipes cause what harm, détente does not seem imminent. The wastewater industry argues that cities can’t keep wrestling with fatbergs while coping with more frequent flooding and other side effects of climate change. They also note that manufacturers are, on balance, losing more lawsuits. Manufacturers, meanwhile, have quietly begun to reformulate some of their products, making them more sewer friendly. (“We know the technology exists,” says Orr, who says he has tested wipes from Japan that fall apart as rapidly as toilet paper.) Powling of Kimberly-Clark, for example, says a recent overhaul of the company’s wipes has entailed using more paper-based materials. And Villee, who has few kind words for the makers of wipes, does say this: “In the seven or eight years I’ve been involved in this, we’ve seen huge improvements.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Those ‘flushable’ bathroom wipes may not be so flushable after all on Dec 25, 2019.