One in four Illawarra residents flush wet wipes down the toilet, a practice that can end up costing them thousands of dollars.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
One of our customers notified us that they had been hit with a $16,000 plumbing bill.
- Eric de Rooy
According to a Sydney Water spokesman, wet wipes are clogging up the sewerage systems in the Illawarra on a “constant basis”, requiring regular removal.
Across the network, the wipes can combine with items like fats and oils to create “fatbergs” – which lead to environmental damage when the blockages create sewage overflows into creeks, rivers and beaches.
“Our research has shown that one in four local residents are flushing wipes and most do so as they believe the packaging that they are ‘flushable’,” the spokesman said.
When people read “flushable” they believe that means the product will break down, but the spokesman said this wasn’t the case.
“The issue is certainly that wet wipes don’t break down like toilet paper,” he said.
“Toilet paper breaks down almost immediately when flushed. Independent tests undertaken by Choice showed that the wet wipes hadn’t broken down in any way during a 21-hour testing period.”
Earlier this month Choice awarded Kleenex a Shonky Award for its flushable wipes.
Each year, Sydney Water removes 500 tonnes of wipes from the network across the Illawarra, Blue Mountains and Sydney every year at a cost of $8 million per year.
That’s just the cost to Sydney Water – these products can also hit home owners in the hip pocket.
“Many customers have told us that based on the ‘flushable’ labelling of wipes they thought it was OK to flush, only to be hit with expensive plumbing bills,” Sydney Water’s service delivery general manager Eric de Rooy said.
“One of our customers notified us that they had been hit with a $16,000 plumbing bill as the result of wipes blocking the sewer pipes on their land and there have been many other examples of plumber’s bills to remove wipes in customer’s sewer pipes ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.”
Sydney Water research showed that men are the main users of the product and it recommended ignoring the “flushable” claim on the packaging.
“Our message to customers is simple,” Mr de Rooy said.
“Keep wipes out of pipes – bin it, don’t flush it.”
