Here’s something you’ve probably never thought about in your life: The final destination of the so-called “disposable” wipes promoted by their manufacturers as a “hygienic alternative to toilet paper.”
Picture, if you will, a solid floor of rags—six- to eight-feet deep—at the bottom of a lift station, ringing the pump.
Chesterton Utility Superintendent Dave Ryan calls that a “rag island.”
The problem with wipes is that they simply don’t shred or biodegrade as quickly as toilet paper does. They do, however, collect grease, fat, and oils—like some horrific, subterranean quicker picker upper—as they wend their way through the collection system en route to the lift stations. Once there, they congeal into nasty sebaceous ganglia—“fatbergs,” the collections crew calls them—which have an unfortunate way of clogging the pumps and causing them to overheat.
Removing rag islands—“We have to break them up,” Ryan notes—and pulling the pumps to extract the fatbergs are time-consuming and manhour-burning chores, especially at the Utility’s largest lift station, the Dickinson Road facility.
Just for the record, the Washington Association of Sewers and Water Districts estimates that sanitary sewers across the country spend approximately $440 million annually tending pumps and repairing damage done by the flushing of single-use disposal wipes.
In the end, disposing of disposable wipes in the trash, not down the toilet, saves wear and tear on the equipment, reduces overtime expense, and frees the Collections Crew for important work elsewhere, Ryan says. “There’s a cost benefit for our customers by tossing the wipes in the garbage. The savings in resources and time not consumed by having to regularly remove them from the system will eventually be passed down to residents and businesses in the rate structure. The Collections Crew will really appreciate it too. A wipeless system is just a lot easier to maintain.”
Because, when you think about it, paper plates are disposable too but it would occur to no one but a toddler to flush them.
