Northern Moraine sewer district warns against flushing wipes as pump replacement costs rise amid pandemic

A huge, nasty clog caused by wipes, often marketed as flushable, was removed last month from the network of a sewer operator serving eastern McHenry County, adding to its plight of rising equipment replacement costs amid the COVID-19 pandemic, officials said.

Over the last 18 months, the Northern Moraine Wastewater Reclamation District, which provides sewer service to Port Barrington, Lakemoor and Island Lake, and soon Holiday Hills, is among many Illinois agencies to have battled bigger and more frequent blockages caused by wipes, often called flushable even though they do not belong down the drain.

Since grocery store shelves were emptied of toilet paper during the early days of the health crisis, the use of flushable wipes in homes has been on the rise, according to officials of wastewater agencies in the state.

That has come with a cost for Northern Moraine.

Last year, it had to spend $37,000 on repairing or replacing pumps, about twice what it normally spends on the year, an increase District Manager Mohammed M. Haque attributed to the problems caused by wipes that do not break down like regular toilet paper.

“What we’ve realized, at least at Northern Moraine, is that it’s causing so much damage to our pumps and costs. It’s unnecessary,” Haque said. “You just have to be respectful of what you flush down the drain. Unfortunately, these wipes are made of materials that are not biodegradable. It’s a bad habit to flush those. It’s causing chaos somewhere or another.”

While wipes are not the biggest headache for all sewer operators in the area — McHenry public works officials said the improper disposal of grease down drains is their biggest concern — Illinois lawmakers took notice of the issue to further regulate how wipes are marketed this year.

They passed the Wipes Labeling Act and Gov. JB Pritzker signed it into law in August, joining Washington and Oregon as the third state to require the phrase “Do not flush” appears on the packaging of wipes that are, in fact, meant to decompose in a landfill instead of a sewer plant and are “likely to be used in a bathroom and have significant potential to be flushed.”

The law takes effect next year, and its enactment was a win for the Illinois Association of Wastewater Agencies, an industry group representing wastewater operators.

“The General Assembly finds that creating labeling standards for disposable wipes products will protect public health, the environment, water quality, and public infrastructure used for the collection, transport and treatment of wastewater,” the law says.

But there is a second front in the battle between wipes manufacturers and sewer systems that goes beyond how the wipes are described on packaging materials. That includes defining the standards of a flushable material, said Brian Johnson, who serves on the wastewater association’s legislative committee and is executive director of the Greater Peoria Sanitary District.

A lawsuit filed in federal court in South Carolina by a sewer operator there is in the process of being settled, and that case dealt with the standards of flushability and will lead to changes in the business models of wipes makers to benefit the future of sewer systems, Johnson said.

“I never would have imagined 10 years ago all the issues that these things would cause. The pandemic made it worse by far,” Johnson said. “Manufacturers like (the one sued in South Carolina) saw a way to market their product and get a competitive advantage over other people and they did it.”

Aside from trying to establish a legal definition of the term “flushable” and requiring labels and packaging instructing people not to flush wipes, sewer operators in the future may have to step up enforcement of their local ordinances meant to prohibit flushing of inappropriate materials when there are particularly consistent offenders, Johnson said, adding that nursing homes are sometimes big contributors to the problem.

Enforcement can involve actions as serious as shutting off service in some cases, Johnson said, but sewer operators rarely go that far and generally opt to fix issues quickly rather than vigorously pursue violators with penalties.

“To say we’re going to aggressively enforce things is not really culturally where we are comfortable. We can do it, but we would rather work in collaboration with as opposed to adversarial,” Johnson said.

Other than that, sewer operators are optimistic their educational campaigns for ratepayers on what is alright to flush and what is not in can mitigate the problem.

“Ultimately, the homeowner ends up paying the costs one way or another, whether it’s utility costs or costs in their home systems, too. We just want to educate people really. I think people are favorable of making smart decisions. People are willing to be conscientious,” Northern Moraine’s Haque said.