The Wet wipes are one of the most harmful waste products the industry has produced in recent years. and one of those that is growing the most. They are already the third most common waste found in natural spaces in Spain, mainly in marine and aquatic ecosystems, according to the Libera Project, by Ecoembes and SEO/BirdLife. “He toilet monster has to disappear,” they warn.
Wipes have become a problem that is beyond any control, as they clog sewer networks, drains and purification systems, forcing public administrations to spend huge amounts of money every year to repair breakdowns because of this. The origin: the habit of many users of flushing these items down the toilet.
According to Ecoembes and SEO/BirdLife, promoters of this initiative, Each Spaniard consumes more than 15 kilos of wet wipes per yearwhich places Spain above the European average, which is positioned as the third producer of wipes in Europe.
The problem is getting worse because more and more types of wet wipes are being marketed, for different purposes. There are them for personal hygiene, for cleaning furniture, for bathrooms and for practically any task in the home. This only multiplies the impact caused by the abandonment of this highly polluting article.
They should not be flushed down the toilet
With all this, SEO/BirdLife warns that disposing of objects such as wipes in the toilet can cause “big problems”: first for the environment, due to the accumulation of wipes in streams that “completely” envelop the trees and transform the areas in sewers and landfills and, secondly, because the traffic jams they cause represent an economic cost for municipal coffers.
A recent example is the municipality of Lorca (Murcia). So far this year, at the La Hoya Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP), up to 70 tons of waste in pretreatment composed mainly of wipes.
“Every day 211 kilos of this waste are collected in Lorca, the removal of which has an annual impact of 5,000 euros. It is an amount to which we must add the costs due to breakdowns and breakage of machinery as a result of the blockages that originate in the sewer network and in the treatment plant” as reported by the City Council of this town a few days ago.
At the national level, the Spanish Water Supply and Sanitation Association (AEAS) estimates that wastewater treatment plants collect about 10 kilos per year of wipes per person (including organic waste that sticks along the way), according to Eroski/Consumer magazine.
As a consequence, cleaning and fixing breaks in the sanitation network costs each Spanish citizen about five euros a year. An expense close to 120 million euros annually that ends up having an impact on water bills that users pay as part of the cost of the services they receive. On average, in a city of one million inhabitants, close to five million euros are invested annually for this task.
This impressive video shows what happened, for example, in Valencia:
Libera, the joint environmental initiative of Ecoembes and SEO/BirdLife, states that wipes are composed of microplastics of up to 5 millimeters that come from products of that size in their origin or from the fragmentation of larger plastic elements.
“They are not biodegradable”
But are they really biodegradable, as advertising usually indicates? According to the director of AEAS, Fernando Morcillo, for an item to be considered biodegradable and not cause problems, it has to decompose within a period of between five and 30 days. But When the wipe includes synthetic materials to provide resistance, degradation is very slow and can take up to hundreds of years.
Other entities such as Greenpeace ask that they stop being manufactured and sold due to their high impact: “Wet wipes are a recent invention, one more of the disposable fashion, and they are completely dispensable (using toilet paper or water, for example). . Besides, They are not biodegradable, even though they are advertised as such, since they are made with microplastics and, some, with cellulose microfibers.. They contain, therefore, synthetic fibers and substances that impregnate the fabric such as preservatives, surfactants and moisturizers,” says Julio Barea, head of Campaigns for this organization.
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Contact of the Environment section: [email protected]