WATCH: A campaign is in the works to stop you from flushing wipes down the toilet. John Hua tells us the problems it’s causing and why it’s costing municipalities hundreds of thousands of dollars.
VANCOUVER – Disposable wipes have become a $250,000 a year problem for Metro Vancouver.
Two to three times a week, wipes that are being flushed down the toilet are blocking sewer pumps under the Lower Mainland. While crews are sent down to clear the debris, sometimes it’s too late.
” We can actually have discharges of raw sewage into receiving waters because it’s so backed up,” says Darrell Mussatto, Mayor of North Vancouver and Metro Vancouver’s Utilities Chair.
“We have to spend about $250,000 a year unclogging pumps. So we have people full-time just pumps about two or three a week.”
Metro Vancouver is planning to launch an awareness campaign in the spring and summer reminding people to throw disposable wipes in the trash and not down the toilet.
“What we’re finding too is that many of these wipes, the flushable wipes that say they are okay to go into the toilet, are actually not flushable,” says Mussatto.
Environmentalists says this issue has caught many municipalities off-guard, with little input or warning from the manufacturers.
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“The only way we can solve this problem is at the beginning of the pipe…we have to put pressure on the producers and the governments that put pressures on the producer,” says environmentalist Helen Spiegelman.
One Canadian group is trying to do just that by creating internationally-recognized standards for the disposable wipe industry. Barry Orr with the Municipal Enforcement Sewer Use Group (MESUG) says many of the tests used by manufacturers do not translate in the real world.
“It’s a voluntary guideline. There is no third-party testing that is required and many of the manufacturers do their own testing,” says Orr.
He says one example of testing includes using a slosh box to gauge how quickly a flushable wipe breaks down. He says there are no waves in a sewer.
“There are a number of tests the manufacturers have put out there, and they are just not duplicating our sewer systems,” adds Orr.
MESUG will be meeting with municipal and sewer industry representatives from around the world, hoping to draft new standards for testing.
They hope to have the standards approved by mid-2016.
In the meantime, Metro Vancouver hopes people will choose the lesser of two evils by throwing the wipes in the trash instead of flushing them down the toilet.
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