With the market for pre-moistened bathroom wipes having increased sharply these last few years, whether it’s for personal use replacing toilet paper or to clean up babies, a new problem has arisen, slowly plaguing pump stations across the country and internationally.
Despite some of them being labeled as flushable, those wipes have become a nuisance for lots of municipalities, clogging pump stations’ sewer systems, creating backups and causing hundreds of thousands dollars’ worth of maintenance costs every year .
While standard wipes should just been thrown in the trash, flushable wipes are supposed to disintegrate into small pieces after being flushed but, according to tests, it’s far from always being the case. With a lot of factors to take into consideration, it doesn’t however mean that all flushable wipes are wrongly labelled and the only source of all these issues, especially as they currently only represent a small portion (less than 20%) of this fast growing market. Not only sewer pipes or systems might be too old but consumers might not make the difference between flushable and non-flushable wipes and just toss everything indifferently in the toilets.
To solve this, cities have to spend a fortune on deragging maintenance costs to clean up clogged up pipes, an unwelcome expense that is creating a financial struggle for small cities.
So what are the solutions? Well there are a couple actions each city should consider to fight this sewer “plague”. First, consumers need to be educated and warned about the problems flushing wipes are causing: they should stop throwing wipes down the toilets altogether or, at least, only flush those that are flushable.
Most importantly, municipalities need to protect their pump stations and sewer systems from clogging while avoiding those high maintenance costs, which can be achieved successfully by installing innovative wastewater bar screens such as Aqualitec’s Screentec.
To find out how Aqualitec can help you, call 855-650-2214 or email us now.