December 15 – For ten years, Brian Schmitz’s job at Anchorage’s Asplund Wastewater Treatment Plant involved “dismantling” equipment.
That is, manually removing masses of contaminated wipes flushed down people’s toilets, which eventually clotted through the sewage system and contaminated equipment.
“Rags” are what those in the water treatment industry call the broad class of consumer products known as “wipes” – baby wipes, disinfectant wipes, and “personal cleaning wipes” used as toilet paper, with names like Dude Wipes, Stall Mates, and GoodWipes flushable wipes. Manufacturers boldly declare on the packaging that the items are ‘flushable’.
“That’s what the rags do,” said Schmitz, now the plant’s superintendent, pointing to what appeared to be a pile of frozen seaweed piled on top of a dumpster. It was a conglomeration of tanned wipes, soaked in raw sewage pouring out of a funnel. It smelled like a neglected zoo enclosure on a hot summer day.
“We call them ‘rope rags,'” Schmitz said, referring to the phenomenon in which many individual cloths are spun, mashed and twisted around each other until the mass grows so large that it confuses screening equipment. Plant operators must, just as Schmitz in his younger years, periodically pulling out the rope cloths with chains, pitchforks and a custom-made treble hook that resembles a tool for fishing giant squid.
“(We get) this amount probably every three or four days,” he added, staring at the one in front of him on the lower level of the treatment plant.
Like public water and sewer utilities across the country, Anchorage has a rag problem. The products are typically made from non-woven fabrics derived from petrochemicals, although some brands tout their organic composition. Technically speaking, they are indeed ‘flushable’, in the sense that they disappear down a toilet and pass through the sewer system. But unlike toilet paper, wipes do not break down in water. Instead, they clog and clog the utilities designed to pump large amounts of organic waste and water to the Asplunt plant, where it is treated and discharged into Cook Inlet.
“For the wastewater industry, the cost of wipes is terrible,” said Sandy Baker, the public information coordinator for the Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility.
The AWWU facility is the largest treatment plant in Alaska, processing 30 million gallons of wastewater every day. The largest volume of wipes ends up there, between 6,000 and 7,000 pounds per day, spewed out through an 8-foot diameter pipe that carries “influent wastewater” into filtration troughs. The majority of these wipes are removed from the water system during the screening process, along with all kinds of waste, from grainy bits of sand and stone to clothing and household waste.
But the rope cloths are too massive for this and must be loosened manually. This not only happens at Asplund’s main installation, but also at smaller pumps spread throughout the sewer system.
“We probably have more wear and tear on our pumps,” Baker said. “It costs thousands and thousands of dollars for one of those pumps.”
Wipes are not a new problem for AWWU. But the problems they cause have worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, as more and more of them have become flooded, and the volume has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
“Everyone was using them to wipe down their surfaces,” Schmitz said.
“People got used to it,” Baker interjected.
“They were in the habit of buying the wipes and being ‘ultra hygienic,’” Schimitz added.
This was a national trend. Things got so bad during the early lockdown phase that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a warning.
“Flushing anything other than toilet paper, including disinfectant wipes, can damage internal plumbing and the local sewage system. Repairing these backups is costly and takes time and resources to ensure further proper functioning of wastewater management systems,” it wrote desk in March 2020. .
Wipes aren’t the only bathroom waste disrupting sewage flow. Schmitz said other particularly troublesome grooming supplies that are popping up include dental floss, hair ties and rubber bands, all of which get caught in gears and tangled around machines.
Organic material arriving at Asplund is burned. But the tons of matte wipes can’t be, and instead they are diverted and then placed in dump trucks to be transported to the landfill every day, along with about five tons of ash from the burned poop.
Calculating the exact costs the utility company incurs with wipes is difficult, in part because they have been destroying the sewer system for so long that the procedures for dealing with them are routine.
“So you don’t even know how much you would save if they weren’t there,” Baker said.
In 2020, the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, which lobbies for water utilities across the country, published a report that sought to calculate the cost of wipes on public water systems across America.
The researchers used a conservative methodology to arrive at a price tag of $441 million per year in additional costs. That figure came primarily from the operating costs of sending workers to clean and repair equipment choked with wipes. Capital expenditures to replace equipment that breaks down or deteriorates more quickly due to wipes were not included.
Schmitz lost a drill to rags this year, but said it’s difficult to attribute equipment failures directly to that. He thinks the costs are more likely to be reflected in a shorter lifespan of equipment that wears out more quickly.
Earlier this month, the Anchorage Assembly voted in favor of a proposed rate increase for AWWU customers. If regulators approve the plan, it will mean roughly a 5% increase in ratepayers’ water bills, which amounts to $72 more per year. In explaining the increase, AWWU has cited rising costs of permits, commercial chemicals and labor, some of which is used to dismantle sewer equipment.
Seven states have addressed the problem by passing legislation requiring wipe products to be clearly labeled as non-flushable. And last June, Congress passed the Wastewater Infrastructure Pollution Prevention and Environments Safety Act, or WIPPES Act. The measure, co-sponsored by retiring Alaska Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, would “require certain products to be labeled ‘Do Not Flush’” and establish penalties for violations. The bill was sent to the Senate, where it remained in the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
If passed, the law could ultimately change customers’ understanding and purchasing habits about “flushable wipes,” Baker said, but it won’t be a silver bullet to the water industry’s problems. It can also be difficult to get people to give up habits they’ve had for years, without ever considering the toll this takes on public infrastructure.
Baker and Schmitz both said educating the public is the factor that will ultimately make the biggest difference. In its public publications and social media posts, AWWU regularly advocates for people not to dispose of them in pipes and septic tanks, including in a 12-minute video Baker shared about the utility’s treatment plants.
“They’re wreaking havoc on the system,” Baker says at one point. “Please don’t flush wipes even if they say ‘flushable.’ Just throw them away.”
