A class-action lawsuit between the city of Charleston, South Carolina, and the maker of “flushable wipes”, Kimberly-Clark, has finally been settled, and the city sewers come out the winners.
This is, at least, according to breaking news in the trade magazine Municipal Sewer and Water. From the article:
“As part of the settlement, the company agreed to make its Cottonelle flushable wipes compliant with wastewater industry flushability standards by May 2022, and also agreed to improve the labeling of its wipes products to clarify for consumers what is and isn’t safe to flush.
Michael Saia, public information administrator for Charleston Water System, says the settlement is a huge win for the clean-water industry in an ongoing war it had been losing for years. “The damage to our infrastructure and the environment has only increased along with the sales of so-called flushable wipes,” he says. “Wastewater professionals nationally have been fighting wipes manufacturers and retailers since day one without success. This settlement sets a critical benchmark for flushable wipe dissolvability and product labeling standards.”
We put together a series of five social media posts that showed the impact to our staff, including the divers who were forced to deal with this totally preventable blockage, in the dark, in raw sewage, working with their hands,” says Saia. “It really humanized the issue we were facing.” As a result of that social media effort, the utility received regional and national media coverage, soon becoming the most visible wipes-plagued utility in the nation.”
Soon after the media campaign, the city was contacted by a high-profile legal firm that took on their case. Flushable wipes are the bane of sewage utilities all over the world (they are one of the main sources of plugging with fatbergs), including here in Metro Vancouver, so I expect that this settlement will have a lot of ramifications. The company admitted no wrong-doing, of course, but thought it wiser to settle. Indeed, the wipes are flushable, no different than baby alligators; it’s the fact that they plug sewers that is an issue.
As a reminder: no floss, no hygiene products, no dog hair, no food waste: that leads to plugging. No expired drugs either: that sickens fish. Only the three “P”: poo, pee, and (toilet) paper should be flushed. Awright, I’ll add a fourth P: puke is okay, sorta.
The culture of what we flush 