Anchorage city officials and utility workers say so-called “flushable” wet wipes are wreaking havoc on the city’s wastewater treatment systems.
As it turns out, the wipes aren’t so flushable after all.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of disposable wet wipes has increased across the country. But the wipes and the expense they cause – in Anchorage’s case, tens of thousands of dollars annually – are the subject of an effort nationwide to better address their impact on wastewater systems.
The Asplund Wastewater Treatment Facility in West Anchorage handles about 28 million gallons of wastewater that gets pumped in daily, carrying everything that’s flushed or put down a sink in Alaska’s largest city. It also includes the contents of septic tanks from other Southcentral communities – like Wasilla, Palmer and Houston – that gets trucked in.
All of that flows through a pipe that’s eight feet in diameter. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline is about half as thick. The pipe leads to a series of three metal screens with quarter-inch holes. Anything larger than those holes is trapped, facility superintendent Brian Schmitz said on a recent tour.
“Food that people put in their disposal, grind up, if it doesn't break down in the collection system, it gets caught here,” Schmitz said. “We then have to remove it. It ends up at the landfill.”
Workers have found all sorts of things that got sent down the drain, Schmitz said.
“Found a lot of dog toys,” he said. “ID card once. We keep an eye out for jewelry. We don't often spot the jewelry. I think we found a $20 bill one time.”
But there’s one item that gets caught in the screens more than any others: disposable wipes, from baby wipes to the male-marketed Dude Wipes.
Sandy Baker, public outreach coordinator with the Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility, said she often encounters members of the public who see the word “flushable” on a package of wipes and assume they’re safe to flush.
“Flushable is a difficult term,” Baker said. “It just means it'll flush. Well, there's a lot of things that flush, but they don't break down. So if it's not breaking down like toilet paper, it doesn't belong in the toilet.”
On their own, the wipes aren’t so bad. They would be like anything else among the 2,000 to 10,000 pounds of items screened out of the wastewater every day. But the wipes become a bigger issue when they combine with other things that residents put down their drains, like fats, oils and grease, for which Baker uses the acronym “FOG.”
“When the FOG mixes with the wipes, it becomes a rag,” Baker said. “I mean, it's just this big FOG bundle of not joy.”
Wastewater officials refer to them as “rope rags.” Imagine a 150-pound brown and tangled mix of grease, hair, wipes and assorted muck. An operator inspects the channel of wastewater two to three times a day looking for these, Schmitz said, but the system isn’t really designed for them.
“They're too big. They hang up on the side rails of the equipment,” he said while leading the tour. “There's a hook right over here that we use. So you hook that to the chain hoist. You gotta lower that down there, hook it, and then manually lift it up.”
Some larger bundles need to come up in multiple pieces, weighing upwards of 600 pounds, Schmitz said. And taking those bundles out of the wastewater system doesn’t just add to staff workload. It costs ratepayers money, Baker said.
“You break down how many man hours it takes and what everybody's paid and all that kind of stuff, and then equipment you've bought, it's over $100,000 a year that we're spending to remove wipes,” Baker said.
As the problem of wet wipes clogging up the nation’s wastewater systems has gotten worse, the U.S. House and Senate both have versions of the Wastewater Infrastructure Pollution Prevention and Environmental Safety, or WIPPES, Act. The legislation would require companies to clearly label whether their wipes are really flushable, in the sense they will break down in water.
But, just to be safe, Alaskans should think of the three P’s when they flush, Schmitz said.
“Pee, poo and toilet paper is all that should go into your sewer system,” he said.
Put anything else down the drain, and it could be contributing to the “bundles of not joy” clogging up the pipes, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year.
