CWEA Wastewater Professional :: April 2014 March 2014 Volume 2 | Page 21

Feature Article | Solving the challenge of non-dispersible wipes

Solving the challenge of
non-dispersible wipes
By Alec Mackie, CWEA-WEF Delegate Director

T

hey sound like punch lines for late night
comedians – fatbergs, polar bears, soccer balls,
muffins and beach whistles - but to wastewater
professionals the wipes clogging pumps and pipes are
no laughing matter.
Untangling sewer pumps and valves from the
tightly wound-up mess of wipes and rags is a dirty and
dangerous task for CWEA members. And the frequency of sewers clogging with wipes is rising fast, in the
worst cases some pump stations clog every day. If a
storm hits and balls of rags and wipes get flushed into
the pumps, it could cause an SSO. Who knows if the
State Board will be forgiving in that situation.
Our members are entering dangerous confined
spaces and tearing apart pumps to remove balls of
wipes and rags that contain disease and hypodermic
needles. Impellers can become so tightly bound with
rags, knives or wire cutters are needed to cut them off.
Five years after problems first started surfacing with
these new types of wipes are we any closer to a solution? Can we bring an end to the dirty and dangerous
task of constantly deragging sewer pumps?
As a member of the WEF Work Group focused on
this issue I believe we are getting closer and with
a bit of a push we can put in place solutions to the
problem. Nearly 100 WEF volunteers and several wipe
manufacturers and pump and grinder manufacturers
are all working toward solutions.
During last year’s non-dispersibles discussion at the
Annual Conference, one CWEA member asked simply,
“what would it cost to put a Muffin Monster in every
pump station?” While that question sounded good to
me, as the factory representative, even I realize there
isn’t one single magic bullet that’s going to solve all of
our pump ragging challenges for good.

It’s going to take multiple tactics, coordinated
among several groups and implementing the best ideas
in an efficient, coordinated manner. Moreover, CWEA
members are welcome to participate in this process.
We need stronger relationships between wastewater
associations and the manufacturers of materials clogging our sewers. We also need to hurry up, before a
hard working sewer professional gets hurt unclogging
a pump.
The Background
Introduced in the early 2000s wet wipes were
marketed for household cleaning and “flushable” bathroom use and their popularity exploded. In the early
days, these “flushable“ products were merely resized
versions of baby wipes – wipes made of a stretchy,
plastic material known as spunlace. No wonder they
didn’t disperse.
In recent years most wipes makers switched to a
cellulose substrate, but dispersibility is still an issue.
Wipes makers know they’re under pressure and in
2013 we saw several bathroom wipe breakthroughs,
some using fancy techniques called “airlaid pulp and
binder” or “wetlaid-spunlace-thermal.” Both show
promising rates of dispersibility and indicate wet bathroom wipes can indeed disperse. Sales of wet wipes,
America’s new best friend, are rising at double digit
rates and are now a $5-6 billion product category.
Howard Stern raves about them on his radio show;
a British TV actress hawks them in catchy TV ads called
“Let’s talk About Your Bum”; Fresh Ends are being
pitched at hotels for their guests and Dude Wipes are
being pitched to dudes. We even saw the Shitten hit
the market in 2013 – a soft cotton material sewn
into a glove containing this fuzzy flushable guidance
Wastewater Professional April 2014

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