By Janet Stoica

So who cares what we flush down our toilets, right? Well, if you’re the Water and Sewer Superintendent, you care mightily and so should you, the flusher.

If there’s one single, solitary product that will make your taxes go up due to major clogging and major repair bills at your town or city’s sewage facility, it’s those pesky “flushable wipes.” They have caused millions of dollars in damage to wastewater treatment plants everywhere and should, most likely, be banned from our store shelves. If users would/could throw them in their trash baskets, problem solved. But, they don’t. Down they go into the sewer system with one push of the toilet tank handle or button. What happens next is where the nightmare begins and where your tax dollars rise. The wipes wend their way through your home, apartment, or office’s sewer pipes ending up at the sewer plant’s bar screen filters where they build up, clog disgustingly, and entangle themselves into the pumping system hardware, requiring major repairs, unclogging, and very expensive trucking away. Advice? Please stop flushing them! And, tell all your friends and relatives too.

Additional banes of your local waste treatment plant are what is referred to as FOG (fats, oils, and grease). Grease, fats, and oils cool quickly as they swirl down your waste pipes, causing major clogs. Gross? Yes. Revolting? Of course. Expensive to treat and another major contributing factor to, once again, raising your taxes for extra cleaning services on sewer plant machinery. Why don’t people care what they send down their sink drains and toilets? It’s that old saying: “Out of sight, out of mind.” Other items that are certainly not meant to be flushed can be found at the end of this article courtesy of Webster’s Water and Sewer Superintendent, Tom Cutler. 

So here’s the deal. Your fingertips are on that toilet tank lever or push button ... you flush. Down the toilet pipes goes the waste into your building’s six-inch (service lateral) sewer pipe with the grateful assistance of the water in your toilet tank using a simple gravity flow. From there, the next two stops are an eight-inch connector pipe or a sewer pumping station and then a 30-inch main. In Webster’s case, there are approximately 25 sewer pumping stations of various sizes that serve as waste collection sites for areas of lower elevation. These stations collect waste and then pump it to a higher level so that gravity can resume its work flow to the local sewer plant. When the waste water flows into the sewer plant, it is filtered through a bar screen (there’s those disgusting “flushable” wipes again), then flows into a sludge tank where bio-solids are stored before further processing. Next stop is the aeration tanks. Here, air is added to the sludge to promote biodegradation of organic contaminants. A clarifier tank is the next stop where solids settle to the bottom of the tank and are removed for recycling. Floating substances are gathered by a rotating skimmer on the surface of the water. Then, it’s on to the digesting tanks holding bacteria that digest residual solids. Sewage tanker trucks are then used for transportation of the remaining residual solids to incineration facilities and after undergoing strict additional sanitizing, the remaining liquid is released into local waterways. 

 If there’s anything to take away from reading this article, it’s to remember that the only two items that should be flushed down the sewer are human waste and toilet paper. 

Here’s the remaining list of items Not to Flush:  DO NOT FLUSH OR POUR · Cloth rags or paper towels · Wipes (baby, adult, disinfecting, etc.) · Feminine hygiene products · Used medications · Beauty products, Q-tips, dental floss · Plastics of any kind · Diapers · Fats, oils, and grease · Garden supplies (pesticides, fertilizers).

Contact Janet: [email protected]