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Disinfectant wipes can gum up the machinery at the county's wastewater treatment plants. These wipes were removed from a sewage pumping station; the blue machine is a submersible pump.

In addition to wipes, Prince William Service Authority employees have found other unusual items in the wastewater stream over the past year, including this dumbell found in a sewer main.

Disinfectant wipes can gum up the machinery at the county's wastewater treatment plants. These wipes were removed from a sewage pumping station; the blue machine is a submersible pump.

Staff at the H.L. Mooney Advanced Water Reclamation Facility in Woodbridge could see the problem developing early in the pandemic. 

Just months after schools and workplaces closed in March last year, workers were noticing more of a common foe for wastewater plants everywhere: the disinfectant wipe.

“We had been monitoring visually once per week, and we started visually seeing more and more wipes in the sanitary sewer. And where you actually see them is at this pumping station where you’re seeing the sewage,” said Keenan Howell, director of communications for the Prince William County Service Authority, which operates the facility. 

The problem was most visible at machines called channel grinder impellers. Effectively, pumps spin wastewater in a centrifuge, separating solids from liquids as a grinder cuts up any solids. 

Wipes have long been a problem for municipal water treatment plans, but the problem has only become worse in Prince William and nationwide since the pandemic began. According to the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, which represents more than 300 public wastewater utilities, the problem costs America’s municipalities over $1 billion every year.

Unlike toilet paper, which is designed to dissolve quickly in water, the wipes take a long time to break down. And at the Mooney facility, one of two wastewater treatment plants that serve Prince William, they’re also difficult for the grinder’s blades to cut up. Instead, Howell says, the wipes often wrap around the blades. 

“They’re malleable; they’re not brittle. They’re actually designed to be moldable and foldable,” he said. “That creates a real problem because they’ll get wound around these pumps and take up too much mass around those pumps. That’s when you can potentially run into technical difficulties in the wastewater pumping process.”

After noticing the increase in wipes, employees at the Mooney facility doubled their in-person visual monitoring of the pumps to twice a week to find and address any issues before they began seriously affecting the treatment system. When maintenance staff sees wipes or other solids building up around the grinder pumps, they manually remove the obstruction.

But doubling the oversight has only allowed the facility to keep up with the problem. Since the pandemic started, there have still been three back-ups from clogs in the system. 

Howell says more people using – and improperly disposing of – the wipes at home is a big part of the problem. But other things, such as people cooking at home more since the pandemic started, have had an impact, too. When people pour hot cooking oil down the drain, it eventually cools and solidifies, but it does so down the line. 

The service authority has also seen an uptick in items being dumped right into the sewers via manholes, and recently has had to remove things such as dumbbells and large rocks.

In addition to wipes, Prince William Service Authority employees have found other unusual items in the wastewater stream over the past year, including this dumbell found in a sewer main.

“We’ve seen three back-ups specific to things in the sanitary sewer system that shouldn’t be there since March, and that includes wipes and [oil and grease],” Howell said. “If we hadn’t increased our visual inspection to twice per week, it could’ve been worse.”

Demand for wipes has surged since the pandemic began and remained extremely high, despite a growing understanding that COVID-19 is far less likely to spread via surfaces than through the air via respiratory droplets. Still, Clorox CEO Linda Rendle said in February that the company –  the biggest brand-name manufacturer of disinfectant wipes – was producing 1.5 million canisters of its wipes every day.

But wastewater managers and service authorities such as Prince William’s have consistently tried to remind consumers that the wipes are meant to be thrown in the trash, not flushed down the toilet. The Prince William County Service Authority has had a running public information campaign telling people to “keep wipes out of pipes.” The campaign focuses on flushing only what the authority calls the “Three P’s” – pee, poop and [toilet] paper.

According to Howell, many products that are labeled as “flushable wipes” are just as bad. Groups like the association of clean water agencies have pushed for legislation that would make companies clearly label their wipes as non-flushable and set a real standard for what can be marketed as “flushable.”

Earlier this year, the public works commission in Charleston, S.C., sued retailers for selling what they labeled “flushable” wipes that still damaged the sewer and septic systems.

“A lot of things are flushable,” Howell said, “but just because they’re flushable doesn’t mean they’re soluble.”

Jared Foretek covers the Manassas area and regional news across Northern Virginia. Reach him at jforetek@insidenova.com

Jared Foretek covers Prince William County Public Schools, the city of Manassas and transportation news across Northern Virginia. Reach him at jforetek@insidenova.com

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