With its sewer system under siege, tallying millions of dollars in equipment damage across its underground maze, New York City is confronting a menace that has gummed the gears of plumbing networks around the world: the common wet wipe.
Michael Brady, a worker at the Newtown Creek plant in Brooklyn, raking wipes and other waste into a bin for disposal. ( Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times)
In recent years, the intersection of evolving hygienic sensibilities and aggressive industry marketing has fueled the product’s rise. Wet wipes, long used for baby care, have grown popular with adults.
Some of the products are branded as “flushable” — a characterization contested by wastewater officials and plaintiffs bringing class-action lawsuits against wipes manufacturers for upending their plumbing.
Often, the wipes combine with other materials, like congealed grease, to create a sort of superknot. “They’re really indestructible,” said Vincent Sapienza, a deputy commissioner for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. “I guess that’s the purpose.”
The city has spent more than $18 million in the past five years on wipe-related equipment problems, officials said. The volume of materials extracted from screening machines at the city’s wastewater treatment plants has more than doubled since 2008, an increase attributed largely to the wipes.
A mechanical rake at the Newtown Creek plant collecting solid waste, mostly wet wipes, for disposal. ( Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times)
Removal is an unpleasant task. The dank clusters, graying and impenetrable, gain mass like demon snowballs as they travel. Pumps clog. Gears falter. Then, there is the final blow, wrought by an intake of sewage that overwhelmed a portion of a north Brooklyn treatment plant.
“Odor control,” a sign there reads. But on a recent afternoon, the second word had disappeared behind a wayward splotch: It was a used wipe, etched with a heavenly cloud design.
The city is not alone. Wet wipes, which do not disintegrate the way traditional toilet paper does, have plagued Hawaii and Alaska, Wisconsin and California. Sewer systems have been stuffed in Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me. Semantic debates have visited Charleston, W.Va., challenging the latitude of “flushability.” “I agree that they’re flushable,” said Tim Haapala, operations manager for the Charleston Sanitary Board. “A golf ball is flushable, but it’s not a good idea.”
The consummate cautionary tale is that of London, where in 2013 a collection of wipes, congealed cooking oil and other materials totaled 15 tons, according to Thames Water, the utility company that removed it. It was known, like some previous occurrences, as the fatberg. “We reckon it has to be the biggest such berg in British history,” Gordon Hailwood, an official with Thames Water, said at the time.
For wipe manufacturers, heavy investments in products for adults have resonated with customers. Market research, cited in a Bloomberg News article last year, suggested that from 2008 to 2013, sales of the moist flushable wipes had grown 23 percent to $367 million.
In New York, city officials are tackling the problem in various ways. A City Council bill, which has the backing of the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, was introduced last month to prohibit advertising certain moist wipes as flushable. The environmental department has begun work on a public awareness campaign concerning the importance of proper wipe disposal: throwing them in the trash.
Raw sewage entering the plant. ( Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times)
Emily Lloyd, Mr. de Blasio’s environmental commissioner, who also served in that role from 2005 to 2009 and was sanitation commissioner from 1992 to 1994, recalled the warning she received during a return tour of a wastewater plant last year: “You’re not going to believe what’s happened with baby wipes.” And it is residents, Ms. Lloyd noted, who bear the extra cost. “That goes, obviously, on the water rates,” she said. “It’s an expense we didn’t have before that now we have.”
High-profile wipes champions have included the television host Dr. Mehmet Oz; he has since reversed course after conferring with wastewater experts. In a segment outlining his change of heart, he advised viewers to return to regular toilet paper, manually moistened if possible.
Industry representatives chafe at the suggestion that they have operated irresponsibly. The prime culprits, they say, are customers who ignore label warnings.
Dave Rousse, president of the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry, a trade group representing wipes manufacturers, said a vast majority of problems derived from “nonflushable wipes inappropriately flushed.”
The group has teamed up with municipal officials and advocacy groups to promote proper disposal. The industry even pitched in with a logo. “It’s the symbol of a stick man dropping something in the toilet, with a slash bar across the stick man,” Mr. Rousse said. But environmentalists say the industry must do more, calling for improved labeling and refined standards for what is considered flushable.
While companies like Procter & Gamble have maintained that their flushable wipes are compatible with municipal pumps, wastewater authorities have long argued that guidelines are not stringent enough.
A wet wipe stuck to a pipe. ( Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times)
At issue, primarily, is an industry trial known as the “slosh box test,” designed to gauge disintegration thresholds. Critics say the test, which rocks wipes back and forth in a crate of water, does not properly mimic the wastewater system, allowing manufacturers to claim flushability for a product that may be too sturdy for treatment systems. The test is “a lot more turbulent than the flow that you find in a wastewater pipe,” said Cynthia Finley, director of regulatory affairs for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. Flushed materials, she added, generally move “on very gentle slopes.”
Mr. Rousse agreed that the test “can be modified,” but added that only 5 or 6 percent of wipes were designed to be flushable, suggesting that much of the trouble involved improper disposal.
City officials have emphasized that they are not anti-wipe. The Council bill would keep the “flushable” label off any product that does not pass a third-party test approved by the environmental protection commissioner, but would not imperil sales, supporters say. “We’re not banning wipes,” said Councilman Antonio Reynoso, a co-sponsor. He said the bill would simply ban the “flushable” label for products that emerge from the wastewater treatment process “almost as new.”
On a recent afternoon at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn, heaps of wipes — flushable or otherwise — had survived the underground journey intact.
They clung to walls and wires, hanging off gears and horizontal rails, with some discarded atop a metal sheet.
A sewage treatment worker, Michael Brady, approached with a rake, sidling up beside the machines. He cleared the materials off the sheet, into a small trash bin.
“It’s kind of gross,” Mr. Brady said, scraping the bottom clean.
© nytimes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.