Search Engine - Are flushable wipes actually flushable?

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

A simple question leads us on a journey from the bowels of New York City through the courtrooms of South Carolina to the disgusting truth. Support Search Engine! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, search engine listeners. An announcement before we start the show, we are hosting our first ever finders salon in New York City on March 20th. What's the salon? That's a question I've been asking myself ever since I wrote on a website that finders are highest paid tier of listeners

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Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. Okay, I never know how to start these things. So I'll just say, hey, PJ. Hey, what do you have? Do you have a story for me today? I have a story for you today. It's a story about a question that we've actually received a few times at search engine.

What is the question? So it's a question that I'd seen float around the internet before, but it had never really grabbed my attention in any real way. Like, it seemed like a question that would work really well as a New York Post headline, but like I wasn't sure there was much more to it. Is it about Hunter Biden? No, it's about flushable wipes. It's not a New York post headline. You're reading a different New York Post than I am. So this question just never jumped out to me, but there was something about having received the same question many times that at least put it on my radar. And then we get the question.

in an email from a guy named Egan. You sent us an email a few months ago now, and I'm wondering if you could just read that email to us. Yeah, no, do you just want me to read it verbatim? Yeah, you can read it verbatim. Okay. Yeah, so my question is, can I flush flushable wipes or not?

Every package in the store is trying very hard to convince me that I can. Meanwhile, pretty much everyone on the internet said not to, so who do I believe? And can I ask, like, do you use these? Have you ever used these? No, I don't trust them. Never have. You don't trust them?

No, because all I can think about is sending these things down the plumbing, and then it gets clogged or creates some back-end issue, and I've created a several thousand-dollar problem for somebody. So for me, it's just not worth it. Egan's a mechanical engineer, and he said that the engineering part of his brain suspects that the flushable claim might be true in a lab, but not in the actual sewage system.

Okay, so it's not just a question about wipes, It's a question about rules, interpretation, and whether this is one where companies are playing fair or not. Yeah, it's a question about all of those things, but it's also just a question about wipes. Because Egan said, he said, look, I've got a lot of doubts. I've seen all kinds of ways that companies can pull fast ones. But at the end of the day, I would love to use this product if it can be proven to me that they are, in fact, safe to flush. You know, I see the benefit, right? I can't argue with it.

So I think if I heard a take that convinced me, I'm open to it. I have to say, in a moment where the country's in vast national crisis, people have ever answered about the future. I like the word of just doing some classic podcasting here. This is the question that search engine listeners are demanding that we answer, and we're heating the call. So after I spoke to Egan, I did a lot of research, talked to a lot of people.

I have what I think is a satisfying answer to Egan's question. I'm going to start that answer with something I hadn't really under when I started working on this story, which is just like, where did the flushable wipe even come from? Like, I don't know about you. For me, I didn't know that these products existed, like, as recently as a few years ago. Like, for me, they were nowhere, and now I kind of see them everywhere. And it seemed like maybe this was, like, a product of the pandemic. Yes.

Pandemic is the first time. I don't know if I was aware that they existed. I mean, like, definitely baby wipes. But, like, flushable wipes, I feel like, the first time they probably made it onto a list of things I meant to purchase. was when we were wiping our groceries. Were you wiping your groceries with flushable wipes? I was wiping my groceries with something, and I was standing in the aisle that contained flushable wipes.

Did you flush them after you wiped your groceries? You know, 2020, some people entered periods of greater mental clarity. Some people entered periods of greater mental fuzziness. I was a fuzzy guy. My guess is that I was flushing everything down my toilet. I was real, like, the world is ending. There's no rules. I didn't wear adults.

like non-sweatpants for a year and a half. I was living like a caveman. I coped in a completely different but equally insane way, which is that I ate tuna for lunch every day for two years. I'm not entirely sure why, but it felt good. And awesome white. So this is a product that for me appeared out of nowhere during the pandemic. I definitely didn't grow up with them.

I didn't know that the flushability of wipes was a problem that needed solving. and in the long history of toilet hygiene, fuzzable wipes do come into the picture pretty late. When do they come into the picture? Well, my research took me to some strange places, PJ. I found that in the pre-wipes era, people wiped their butts in all kinds of different ways. The Romans used a stick with a sponge on the end,

soaked in vinegar. Why vinegar? Couldn't tell you. I don't think it sounds kind of nice. The Greeks used shards of broken pottery. I knew that, actually. Why did you know that? I happened to read a book.

If you say so. In the Middle East and other parts of Asia, people are just using water and their hands, which sounds like messier but also probably more effective. And the Japanese were using bamboo sticks with a cloth on the end. Okay, so they were kind of doing their version of the sponge on a stick. That's right. That's right. So it wasn't until...

I have to see there's many kinds of technology where I think of it as kind of a backwards invention. Like technology proceeds forward, but we lose something and it's worse. Like things you need to charge you didn't have to charge. before. Yeah. I bet that like the ancient Romans and Japanese would look at us with the thin, thin, ply toilet paper on our fingers, be like, why aren't you using a stick? You guys are crazy. Well, it's funny. So toilet paper doesn't enter the public record until 600 AD. And this happens in China, a part of the world that famously invented paper. A few centuries later, they're using it in the bathroom. First they invented paper and then they're like, what do we wipe our butts with this?

But they're looked down on by much of the rest of the world. They're like, look at those gross people using paper to wipe their butts. Why don't you use a stick with a clock? Perhaps that's what they were saying. But anyway, I don't know what you were expecting you were walking into today, but I'm going to keep just throwing toilet facts at you. Keep going. This trend of using paper eventually migrates to Europe where the invention of the printing press

flooded the market with a whole lot of new paper that, like, after a while, made perfectly good toilet paper. Oh. And really, books are kind of standard issue supply of toilet paper for, like, centuries in most of the Western world. It's so funny because, like, one of the, the worst things you can do, I mean, there's many terrible things you can do, but one of the, like, sort of socially horrific things you can do is burn a book. But this all the time people are

wiping their butts with them. You're looking at this PJ with a 2026 brain, not with a 1750 brain. In fact, in the U.S., the Farmer's Almanac specifically marketed itself for the purpose of being a great toilet paper product. So you would like read the day's forecast and be like, I'm down with this. Exactly. If you look at a Farmer's Alman, To this day, there's a hole in the top left corner of the book so that you can nail it up in your outhouse so that you can rip paper out when you need it. I could see that coming back as a trend, honestly. Eventually, in different places at different times, people are producing paper specifically for the purpose of wiping your butt. Like toilet paper gets invented in the 1800s.

And that's kind of been the status quo for the last 150 years, at least in the U.S. And it's not until the mid-1990s that we see the first major shakeup of toilet paper hegemony. Which is. So baby wipes had been invented in the 1950s, and slowly over the following decades, the parents doing the butt wiping and the diaper changing, mostly mothers, realized, like, this stuff's pretty good.

Maybe we should start using it for ourselves as the adults in the house. For, like, wiping their own butts? For wiping their own butts. That's so funny. But the big problem with this trend is that baby wipes are not flushable. They should not be flushed down a toilet.

They're made of plastic-based fibers, so they're going to create massive plastic. plumbing clogs if you try to flush them. So there's a problem here. There's a demand. And in 1996, an enterprising entrepreneur launches a product that he thinks is going to solve the problem. He gives it the unfortunate name Moist Mates. Oh. And Moist Mates is the precursor to the modern flushable wipe. Moist Mates. I would not go to the store, see a product I've never heard of, read the label, see that it's called Moist Mates and put it in my cart. It feels like it should be locked up. Well, when you look at it,

you might feel even more strongly in that direction. Because imagine a normal roll of toilet paper, except the sheets of paper are perforated wet wipes designed to disintegrate more easily than like the classic baby wipes, but essentially what you have is wet toilet paper. Right. Which is only, the only reason it's a viable, possible product

is because baby wipes have accidentally created a market of adult baby wipers. That's exactly right. And PJ, I know you're a collector of fine vintage goods. You can actually find more. Moistmates on eBay right now for $99.99. I'm just putting a link in here. Like $100? No, no, no, not $100. $99.99.99. And I want you to take a look at what it looks like. Okay. All right. eBay.

Moistmates dispenser, 80 sheet roll, rare, vintage. The packaging is pretty good. Fleshable, hypoallergenic with aloe. It looks like lily pads, but I guess it's an aloe plant. And then a toilet paper roll with fake flour coming out of it. And then they show. you what it looks like outside of the box. And it's a plastic dispenser. They give you, they kind of give you a vault that you put your wet toilet paper in. And so they don't want your wet toilet paper dripping all over your bathroom. So with the role of wet toilet paper, Moistmates is providing you with a plastic vault. Got it. This seems like a product that doesn't quite. Like it seems like a first draft. It seems like a first to market idea. Which is exactly what it is. But they do have some modest success, like enough success that in 2001, Kimberly

Clark, which is the company that makes Cotonnell products, spends $100 million designing their own version of the product, which they end up calling roll wipes. And is all this like kind of capitalist fervor because toilet paper, even though you don't think of it as

a gold mine, because we use so much of it, if you could innovate there, you know, it's just like Luke or Beyond Your Dreams? I think it's a huge market. If you just think about the number of people on earth using this product every single day. Yeah.

If you can create a product that's going to disrupt the toilet paper industry, you're going to be able to make a lot of money doing it. Got it. So Kimberly Clark comes out with roll wipes. They call it, quote, the first major innovation in toilet paper in 100 years. Do you want to see a commercial for roll wipes? Of course they do. Sponge people, slow motion swimmers, slow motion dancers, slow motion shot of a bunch of ladies bathing suit. Commercials were different in 2001.

To feel truly fresh where it really counts, sometimes wetter is better. Producing Cotonel fresh roll wipes, together with dry toilet paper. These new pre-moisten wipes on a roll, leave you feeling clean and fresher. Ew. It's hard because you can't get past the fact that they're trying to sell you wet toilet paper. So you, I was 8 years old in 2001. You were older than 8 years old? I was older than 8 years old.

I was 16 and trying to make sense of a post 9-11 America. In your trying to make sense of a post-9-11 America, did you encounter roll wipes? No, no. of all the things I remember from that time. And I remember a lot of things. I do not remember roll wipes. It's not entirely surprising to me because roll wipes don't last. They're not a smash hit.

In fact, within a couple of years, they've already left the shelves. Was it just like, is your assumption, because I know this stuff is probably a little hard to historically prove, but the adult baby wipers just kept adult baby wiping and they didn't seize on any of these new weird products? That's a theory that I think is a perfectly good one. Another theory that I saw at the time was that, like, wet toilet paper is both kind of embarrassing

and very public for all of your house guests to see. No, exactly. It's like you come over to somebody's house. It's like a Seinfeld episode. Like you go into their guest bathroom and there's just a wet toilet paper dispenser. I don't know what you suspect, but maybe that some sort of unfortunate medical condition

is going on in that household. Yes. But whatever the reason, flushable wipes sold as roles, basically completely failed by the mid-2000s. But the companies take the wet rolls from the shelves, but then they slowly replace them with a product that looks a whole lot more.

or just like what we think of is the flushable wipe today, which is a flat package of wipes marketed to adults and marketed as flushable. And it comes in the sort of like, it's got the perforation on top that you reach into and you pull the thing out. That's right. So Charmin, Procter & Gamble,

owns the brand Charmin. So they buy the rights to Moist Mates, rebrand them as fresh mates, and after a failed run as wet rolls of toilet paper, they get redesigned as just the classic flushable wipe we would understand today. Like, you can see them in this, commercial from 2005.

Wait a minute, bear. You're not done yet. You might not be clean until you use wet Charmin fresh mates you will find. Okay, can I already say I remember this commercial? For a cleaner clean with Charmin, you will find. Flushable fresh mates you can get behind. Okay, so while the jingle is not for me and I don't care about the Cartoon Bear, I think it's kind of nice.

It's fine. The thing that they're doing that is correct is the way you convince people to change a consumer product that they buy in this aisle is you convince people. is you convince them that they're dirty or stinky. Like, hey, not do you want wet toilet paper, but maybe you've got a dirty butt. I think that's right. I think also they're now selling you a product

that is kind of covert. This isn't replacing your toilet paper roll. It's not right there where your toilet paper that's dry used to be. It's something that you can keep nice and safe on the back of your toilet and... People aren't going to know you're a freak with a dirty butt who likes wet toilet paper.

That's right. Or I guess a freak with a clean butt who likes wet toilet paper. So is this the breakthrough? This is how they finally convince a mass market or some people in it to buy flushable wipes? It's the beginning of that story. So this is in 2005.

By 2005, the thing that we understand as the modern flushable wipe has already been invented. But sales remain like pretty modest for a few years. Like they're on shelves, but they're not flying off of them. But if you look at the market data, that changes very quickly in the early 2010s.

And one reason for that might be because flushable wipes start getting some pretty strong celebrity endorsements. From who? The actor Terrence Howard. Really? Famously suggested that he would not date a woman that did not have wipes in her bathroom.

Did he just say this in an interview? Was this like sponsored? No, this was in an interview, and it was a little questionable, I have to say. What a weird standard for Terrence Howard to have. He wasn't totally alone because a few years later in 2011, Will I Am, waxed poetic on the virtues of flushable wipes to Elle magazine. Huh.

He says, quote, get some chocolate, wipe it on a wooden floor and then try to get it up with some dry towels. You're going to get chocolate in the cracks. That's why you got to get those baby wipes. Different people's minds think about different things. I got to say it's an effective image because I think he's probably right. I do think that a wet, flushable wipe is better at cleaning up a mess than dry toilet paper. Yeah, well, guess what else is in the bathroom, Garrett?

A sink. I'm not going to use the sink to wipe my blood. No, you can just wet toilet paper yourself. You're going to buy pre-wet toilet paper. But here's the thing. Toilet paper is designed to disintegrate immediately when it gets wet. Not if you clump it up. That is one of its virtues.

Oh my God. That is one of the things that makes it not a problem when you flush down the toilet. We have a weird culture that makes too many products. But go ahead. Okay, so it gets some celebrity endorsements. But another probably more important reason that flushable wipes take off in the 2010s is that a brand new company is going to enter the fray that a lot of people are going to fall in love with. Oh. Do you know what company I'm talking about?

Is it gendered? It's gendered. Dude Wipes. Dude Wipes is right. So in 2011, a 27-year-old guy named Sean Riley living in Chicago decides to launch his own flushable white product. Sean Riley, just a normal dude. Just a normal dude. He'd gone to school for construction management, working a 9-to-5, but really more of an entrepreneur at heart.

I just have to say, I'm glad that you went to journalism school to do this story because I have so often been like, what is the deal with dude wipes? I can tell you the deal with dude wipes. So I reached out to dude wipes to ask if someone there would talk to us. They politely declined, but the founder, Sean Riley, shows up in a lot of interviews giving his origin story. So tell me the story, like how you were sitting around in 2012, or I guess probably right before 2012, and with some wipes, with some buddies. So tell me how you decided that you were going to go and disrupt an industry. You know, we were basically in like an animal house. after college. So there was tons of guys coming through. There was, you know, five guys living there,

three on the couch. And we were packing the bathrooms of baby wipes and we just noticed everyone was getting hooked on them, you know? A couple people had used them before. I was buying them from Sam's Club, just putting it in the bathroom. Like, I used baby wipes. And it became this obvious habit. People were getting this funny conversation. So we were like, let's make the brand dude wipes. Sean Riley decides to launch a very loud flushable white brand called Dude Wipes, marketed specifically to men. And really, the innovation here isn't so much on the product side, although he will make efforts to make the wipes bigger and more durable and over time even perhaps more flushable. It's branding. But the real innovation is branding.

And this is why the story of Dude Wipes matters here because the rise of flushable wipes is at its core a marketing story. It's how an entire industry convinced a lot of people to use its weird new product. And Dude Wipes is better at this than maybe anybody else. You know, we're coming out with butt wipes for guys. And it's like, you know, it seemed a little awkward. We're like, no, like, guys could get into this. This is obviously a cleaner way. We all believed in that.

So we had to make product, like, different, you know, for that customer out of the get-go. So first few years, dude Wipes kind of limping along like most startups do. But in 2015, they catch a big break, which is that they get a spot on Shark Tank. Oh. Hi, sharks. My name's Sean Riley, and I'm here with my good friends, Ryan Meagan and Jeff Klimkowski, and we're the guys of dude products hailing from Chicago, Illinois. But you can just call us the dudes.

Dude. And we're here today seeking 300,000. He, like, Sean Riley and his two guys, they just look. They look like dudes. They look like dudes. They're wearing shirts to say dudes on, and one of them has a backwards hat. One of them has, like, I don't want to call it a foahawk, but that sort of foahawk-y-esque haircut. They have, like, very median builds.

They're just dudes. And they've got a toilet on screen that's packed high with dude wipes. The sharks seem charmed. Sharks, are you still wiping the old-fashioned way with just toilet paper? If so, you're a chump, and your ass probably hates you for it.

But hey, what's a dude to do? You could try some baby wipes. But we're not babies. We're dudes. So we created the award-winning dude wipes. They're the very first wipes for, well, dudes. They're flushable, biodegradable, have soothing aloe,

and the answer to every dude's prayers. Okay. So it's like it's both that they're marketing to men, but also they're aware that there's something funny about what they're doing, and it's a little bit fun or uncomfortable to talk about, and maybe that gives it a little bit of energy that will make people pay attention to it.

I think that's right. I think that's the bet they're making, and while it is not a bet that I think pays off on me personally, I do think it's a bet that ultimately paid off for them, because at the end of this Shark Tank segment, they end up getting a pretty significant investment for Mark Cuban. And that capital, along with the exposure on TV, ends up giving them some momentum that they're able to capitalize on during the pandemic.

I see. So when people just need wipes, they remember the brand dude wipes, and that's like a hot moment for them. I think really, maybe even more than that, the pandemic is just a moment where because of the crazy country that we live in, when something like a pandemic hits, we run the one toilet paper, and so people were forced to look for alternatives.

Oh, I totally blocked that out. I ran out and bought a $20 bidet, but I think a lot of people ran out and bought flushable wipes, which were not scarce on shelves. I see. On the toilet paper aisle, but not completely sold out.

I see. And so a lot of people were introduced to flushable wipes for the first time during the pandemic, during the toilet paper shortage. I see. So the stuff I was buying to wipe down my groceries, they were buying as a toilet paper alternative

and they were buying it because they were forced to, but then some portion of them try it, like it, and become consumers. Yeah, apparently a pretty significant portion of them, try it, like it, and become consumers because after a few years, dude wipes is a brand worth over $300 million. That's crazy. It's crazy.

So dude wipes has gotten so big that they're no longer just marketing themselves as a toilet paper supplement, because flushable wipes in this era are known as sort of the finishing wipe. It's the last wipe. You'll use your dry toilet paper, but then to make sure you're squeaky clean, use a flushable wipe to end it. Dudewives is getting a little cocky.

They are now coming to replace your toilet paper. In fact, I visited their website this morning and was confronted with what I thought was honestly a pretty decent argument. Which is what? They said, quote, you wouldn't wash your face with a dry washcloth. Why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper?

Because poop's wet. You're relying on the wetness of your feces to ensure that it's clean. That argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense to make. door-to-door-door dude-wipes salesman. So I guess this is the point where I have to ask you if you've ever used a flushable wipe to wipe yourself after using a bathroom?

No, if you must know, what I have done is on the final wipe, wet a piece of toilet paper, like a normal, I thought, person. Are you getting up, taking the toilet paper to the sink and then returning to the toilet? You bet. And... That is despicable.

I've been distinctly warned against saying this on air, but I use a bidet and I love a bidet, and I think it's crazy that everybody doesn't have a bidet. I have used bidets and loved bidet. By bidet, I will clarify. I don't mean like a high-tech Japanese computer that sings, congratulations you poop song. I mean literally even just like the simple hose, the hose by the toilet.

Okay, so PJ, I used flushable wipes for the first time this morning. Was it a revelation? I have to say they're not totally for me. And it's because like the end of your product experience, is like, yes, you're very clean, but you're also kind of wet, which is my problem with bedaise. You use it. You get clean. But then you're just sitting there kind of wet.

It is a problem. I feel like it's just not my ideal bathroom experience. I feel like the bathroom experience is still actually open to disruption. But so with the dude wipe, you end up with like a wet butt and a dirty adult baby wipe. Yes, but because they are marketed as flushable wipes, what you are then instructed to do as a consumer is to take that wipe and flush it down the toilet like toilet paper. Which returns us to our question. That's right.

Can you? I do think that I am in the minority and not falling in love with dude wipes. Like I think a lot of people who are using flushable wipes really like them. And I think there are a whole lot of people like our listener Egan who are avoiding flushable wipes not because they can't imagine liking them, but because they don't actually believe that they're flushable. They think an American company would lie to make money. I think that Egan, the engineer, uh, is.

familiar with the dissonance between marketing and reality. Okay. So as I kept looking into this, I found that this question, the question of are flushable wipes actually flushable? I found that it's an exceptionally difficult question to answer. It's a question that is being debated in courtrooms and city council meetings and local governments. In courtrooms?

Courts. There are lawsuits being issued all across the country on this topic. And I'm going to tell you about both sides, both the prosecution and the defense. and I'm going to start with the prosecution. After the break, I go to the scene of the crime. It's getting a little stinkier. It never happens at a good time. The pipe bursts at midnight.

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and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so PJ. Yes. To help guide me through this debate, I got in touch with one of the most passionate public servants I've ever met, the former deputy commissioner of New York City's Bureau of Wastewater Treatment, Pam Elardo. My name is Pam Elardo. I am a long-time environmentalist, and I've worked in environmental regulatory field and wastewater treatment field for over 40 years. Pam is a longtime wastewater expert who spent the bulk of her career on the West Coast before getting the call to run. What is almost certainly the most complex wastewater system in the country, New York cities.

And Pam told me that if I wanted to understand how flushable wipes were a problem for our wastewater system, I would need to first understand how the wastewater system actually worked. Does that mean like go into the sewers where the Ninja Turtles live? I didn't myself go into the sewers

where the Ninja Turtles live, but Pam has spent her career thinking about and working on the sewers. When I graduated college, I went and I joined the Peace Corps, and I built water systems and built toilet systems in remote areas of the

country of Nepal. And you've got to imagine, I don't know if people can't imagine, what it's like to live without clean water. And the toll it takes on child and infant mortality. So experiencing all that, it made me realize how much we take that for granted here, how much we undervalue it, how important it is, and to convey the importance in a place where it's taken for granted has been, you know, part of the passion of what I pursue now. I just want to say, The story of modern wastewater management was, to me, at least, one of the most important innovations I'd never really given any thought to. Like, I think it's at least in the conversation for a thing that's had the biggest impact

on quality of life in human history. And so I just asked Pamillardo to explain to me how the system worked. Like, I flush something down the toilet. Help me follow that flush step by step. Like, what happens next? Where does it go? What happens to it? Thank you for asking because one of my goals in life is that every single person knows what happens after they flush.

I'm so heavy I can hope. Yes. All right. So you flush. It goes out your toilet. And there's a local line that connects to a bigger line under your street that collects all the wastewater from your neighbors. And that goes to a bigger line, which is called a trunk line that is directed to a treatment plant. So that's the collection system.

Okay. Over 7,000 miles of wastewater pipes in New York City. Okay, so that's the collection, and then it ends up in the treatment facility. What happens in the treatment facility? So glad you're asking, because you're a human and you use a toilet, and therefore you have a moral obligation to go visit a treatment plant, preferably the one that you poop to. So PJ, I took Pam's moral imperative seriously.

Hey, how's it going? Hello, I'm having. I'm going to be doing some of the toilet. today. Search engine producer Emily Maltaire and I actually went to visit a treatment plant. Evan, Garrett. Nice to be true. And you're the podcast crew.

That's right. Cool. And our tour guide was a guy named Evan, who was an engineer at the plant. It's a plant in Brooklyn called the Newtown Creek. Oh, I know. Is it the one where it's like two silver giant domes? They look like space age football helmets, kind of. I used to live near.

It's such a cool. Yes. The building looks like it's sort of like Area 52 or something. and the first time you find out it's wastewater trimming, you're like, holy moly, it's crazy. Yes, it's very cool. So we treat waste from Brooklyn and Manhattan. This building right here is where our Manhattan waste enters the plant.

We're going to go to the bar screens right now, but that's just for... Okay, first step is preliminary treatment. There's screening systems to take out things that are in the flow that don't belong there. And the screens are just like metal grates, basically? Yeah, they look like bars, like would be in like a jail. The most common design are called bar screens. If you look down there, you're going to see the bars, why we call it a bar screen, down at the very bottom.

So, you know, that's what physically impacts all the problems. So anything that can't pass through the bar screens is just getting scraped up here basically to discard? Yes, just to, it gets brought to the landfill from here. Things like toilet paper will break down to the... There's a million other things that people flush that they should not. So people should not be flushing Tampa, condoms. I heard that once in New York City, they found a handgun. We do find money, dollar bills.

Like cash? Cash, yeah. You know, someone's wallet gets flushed somehow? I don't know. And I'm like, if it's not a 20, I'm not going after it, right? But, you know, you find stuff. So what happens next, PJ, is basically what they're doing is they're taking what would happen in a natural environment and trying to recreate it in the plant just in a much more accelerated way. So the goal is to separate the liquids from the solids, and you take the liquid, you treat it, as we talked about, you polish out most of the dangerous bacteria and you send it back into a receiving water like the East River. And the output from the solids is called sludge,

some of which can be used as fertilizer, some of which has to go to a landfill. And there's also one more byproduct, which is biogas, some of which gets fed back into the system to heat homes. So some people in New York City, where they realize they're not, their apartment heat is coming from a biogas created as a byproduct from cleaning wastewater. I think it's a pretty small percentage, but knowing that this is technically possible,

it's the kind of thing that they could scale up. And I think they're actively working on scaling it up. But to return to our listener question here, as I was learning about this enormous system, part of me found it hard to believe that, like, five-cent wipes would be that big of a deal for what sounded like an insanely sophisticated machine. Like, I was at this space-age-looking facility. that knew how to turn sewage into gas that could heat your home. But Pamillardo was probably better equipped than anyone I had yet talked to to to answer this question from our listener, so I just asked her. We got a question from a listener about a product that he feels he's been getting conflicting information about. He sees flushable wipes in the store.

And so he just wanted to know very simply, can you flush a flushable wipe? Okay. You're the person on the other side of the system that these flushable wipes are occasionally entering. Yes. What is your answer to that question? No. Pamillardo, former head of wastewater management

and the most complicated wastewater system in the world, said unequivocally, flushable wipes, not safe to flush. Not safe to flush. No. Okay. And this is where things have changed a little bit since I was at New York City.

Okay. But not that much. It has not changed my stance on this. There's claims that there are some flushable wipes out there that work. And I think that, you know, it's laudable, I guess. It's like cool, you know. You sound a little skeptical. Of course I am.

I just like the idea of if it doesn't come out of you, it doesn't belong in the loo. You just like the rhyme of it all? I'm just saying the truth. Besides toilet paper. Toilip paper is good. So Pam described the kinds of problems. Fluschable wipes could create in a municipal wastewater system. The first thing they can do is they can just create a simple clog, like for your building or for a pumping station.

And clogs cost money to fix. In the more extreme cases, flushable wipes can contribute to, I think, what can only be described as one of the nastiest unintended consequences of human innovation in history. They're called Fatburgs. What's a Fatberg? It's a Portminto of Fat and Iceberg. And a fatberg is when fats, oils, and greases that end up in our wastewater system combined with non-biodegradables like wipes to create a very disgusting clock. Can I show you one? Yeah, please.

All right, wait, I'm loading it up. 130-ton fatberg causing stink in London sewers. This is going to be real nasty. Below the surface of England's capital city lies a dark and disgusting. It smells pretty unpleasant. In the 150-year-old sewers of East London, a huge massive waste known as a Fatberg is blocking a substantial stretch of the system.

Oh, it's really gross. It looks like, it's like an open shot of the sewer fight, but it looks like somebody made ice cream out of, like, fat feces and sludge. So the Fatberg is formed of a mixture of fats, oils and greases, mixed with lots of sanitary items like wet wipes, and they congealed together to perform this concrete like blockage.

It weighed as much as 11 double-decker buses, which is a hilariously British way to measure the weight of something. It was over 800 feet long. It took nine weeks to clear, and it cost the city a whole lot of money to clear it. And flushable wipes are like one of the ingredients that helps create a fat bird.

They're like the base layer, and then it just like starts soaking up oil and fat and everything. That is the accusation being made by municipal wastewater officials. So flushable wipe, according to the people who ought to know are not flushable. It's kind of an example of a negative externality.

It's like a cost is being born elsewhere in the system, not by the people who are making the choice. Well, because these are municipal systems, the costs are being eventually paid by the people that live there. I mean, your rates are going up because this is the city department. Right. So your taxpayer dollars are having eventually to pay

for the problems that you are creating by flushing stuff down the toilet that you should. I'm not doing this. I've never used the flood. But that's not all, PJ. Oh. If it doesn't create a clog in a pipe and it doesn't contribute to a mass of Fedberg, it can end up at the gates of a wastewater treatment plant, as we discussed.

Oh, at the, like, border thing. At the front door, at the jail bars. Interesting. When I went to the wastewater facility, I saw the metal grates with my own eyes, and Evan, the plant engineer who was giving us the tour, showed me all the stuff that they were pulling up. Just from the eye test, it's 99% wet wipes. The only other thing I see is one bag of chips,

and then another piece of plastic. And I have to say, we saw dumpsters upon dumpsters full of what just looked like a grade mass of white-looking things. And this is just at one facility. Wastewater officials that I spoke to said that they spent across the entire system something like $20 million a year on the wipes problem. Things like toilet paper will break down to the point

where they flow right through these bar screens so they don't get impacted at all. And it's only these like non-woven textile flushable wipes that are going to be paused. You put the word flushable in air quotes. Yeah, that won't come through on the audio, but yes. So you could see the point in the system where the flushable wipes were not flushable.

I was seeing the point in the system where wipes were ending up where they shouldn't have been. The clear evidence that some wipes being flushed were not dispersing in the wastewater system, whether or not they were wipes marketed as flushable or wipes marketed as not flushable, I can't say. But I think at this point, I'm going to share with you a graph that Pamillardo shared with me.

Okay. And I just want to see what you make of it. So Pamillardo sent me a graph that to her is evidence that flushable wipes are contributing to... This is quite damning. The kinds of problems that municipal wastewater agencies are dealing with. So it's just, it's two lines. One is monthly screenings, which I guess is them having to pull stuff out of the filter screen. That's right.

So that goes... It sort of hockey sticks up, and it hockey sticks up almost directly in line with the introduction of flushable wipes onto the market and their growth in sales. Like, they're very, I know correlation causation aren't always the same, but they're very, very tightly mapped. This feels like, I mean, as close as you're going to be able to get to certainty, which is like you have a graph showing that there's a direct link between the Verizon's hills and tells of flushable wipes and these clogs. You have the former head of the wastewater in New York City saying the wipes are a problem. you're seeing with your own eyes the great that's supposed to keep non-fleshable things out of the treatment and it's filled with wipes of unknown origin. This is the point at which I need to tell you about the other side of this argument.

Which is? There's another group of people who very much do not agree with Pamillardo's reading of the case. Big dude wipe? Big wipes. That's right. The wipes industry does not take kindly to all of these accusations and implications being bandied about by the wastewater folks. And honestly, they have some pretty convincing arguments on their side. after the break, the defense. Wishing you could be there live for the big game,

soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd. But too often, life gets busy. Or the price hold you back. Priceline is here to help you make it happy. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip.

Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. You should tell the people who we are and what our new show is. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.

And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. We struggled to come up with a name, decided to call it, business history. You know why? Why? Does this show about the history of business? Available.

Everywhere you get your product. Can you say your name and what you do? My name's Wes Fisher. I'm the Director of Government Affairs for Inda, the Association of the Non-Wiven Fabrics Industry. So to understand the other side of this debate, I got in touch with Wes Fisher, who spends a lot of his time thinking about flushable wipes,

which apparently falls into a trade category called non-woven fabrics. Non-wovens are a kind of subset of the textile industry. I tell people it's like if textile, and papermaking had a baby. So we represent products all up and down the supply chain, as well as wipes being a big chunk of the products we represent. Wes Fisher, very good at his job. I posed him our listener question the same way I posed it to Pamillardo.

He just wanted to know very simply, can you flush a flushable wipe? The answer is, yes, absolutely. If it's in the United States on a shelf and it says it's flushable, it has passed a lot of different standards and tests and held up to a lot of scrutiny to make that claim. And he said, unequivocally, flushable wipes,

totally safe to flush. Not surprising, it's a long-standing position in a long-standing battle between municipal wastewater officials and the wipes industry. This is a battle that boils down to standards, which sounds kind of boring and it kind of is, but it's very important to the story here. So just to explain very quickly,

Inda created a set of standards on what a product has to do in order for it to be, quote, flushable. And is it like how easily is it destroyed in liquid? That's right. Among some other things, mostly what it boils down to is how quickly is this product going to disperse when it hits a sewage system? Municipal wastewater agencies say that that standard is not nearly rigorous enough to simulate real-world conditions, like that products could meet that standard and still cause problems for our systems. So clean water agencies developed their own competing standards, that they say products should have to meet in order to be called flushable.

But the kickers that those more rigorous standards would be much more expensive for the manufacturers to meet, and so they didn't want to do it. More than that, they say they don't need to do it. They say that their standards are fine and that the real culprits here are the non-flushable wipes that these pesky consumers are flushing down their toilet anyway. And on that theory of the case, if you're trying to make sense of that graph that Pamelardo shared, I mean, one way of looking at it is that when flushable wipes, hit the market, and you have brands like dude wipes really popping off on social media,

you are now creating a consumer expectation that it is safe to flush things down your toilet besides the things that have historically been safe to flush down your toilet. Oh, so the other argument would be that once people started flushing flushable wipes, even if the wipes weren't causing problems, maybe now they're fleshing paper towels. Like, you just open the door. I mean, if I think about it, like, from my own dumb brain, if I start seeing flushable wipes on the market, I think I'm like, maybe the sewage system's gotten better and it can handle more stuff now. Maybe I can start flushing all kinds of things down the toilet. Like it's

20... Did you start flushing all kinds of things on the toilet? I didn't. I'm a pretty conservative flusher. But like, you know, there's one way of looking at this that says, flushable wipes create a kind of consumer behavior that becomes problematic, but that doesn't necessarily mean that flushable wipes are problematic themselves. Couldn't you test it, though? I mean, couldn't you like, um, die all the flushable wipes red or something and then figure out if they're hitting the grate? Well, the first thing that happens, in this fight between municipal wastewater agencies and wipes manufacturers is a lawsuit that gets issued in 2015.

The confusingly named town of Wyoming, Minnesota... What? Oh, it's next to Pennsylvania, Texas. That's right. So Wyoming, Minnesota sues the giants. Procter & Gamble, Kimberly Clark, several other defendants are named. Importantly, they're suing for compensatory dam.

Essentially, they're asking for the wipes manufacturers to pay millions of dollars in damages for all the broken pumps and jetted pipes and all that stuff. But suing for compensatory damages requires a very specific kind of evidence. Like, essentially, you have to prove that this specific company's wipe created this specific clog that resulted in that specific bill. Like, it's creating a very specific argument of evidence. You can't point to a graph. You have to really... Exactly. You can't say, look, as wipe sales went up, so too did the cubic feet of waste that we were having.

having to discard from these facilities, you have to prove some sort of causal connection. So did they try to? Well, Wyoming, Minnesota, as the first mover in this fight, doesn't really think about that ahead of time. They get into this lawsuit, and pretty quickly the industry's lawyers come up with a pretty simple defense, which is exactly what you and I have been discussing. They're saying sewers are messy, people flush all kinds of stuff down the drain. You can't prove that our specific products are causing the specific clogs that you're suing us over. And evidently, the argument works because Wyoming, Minnesota ends up dismissing the suit in 2018.

Okay, but that's just saying you guys have not proved this in a legal liability sense. It's not saying you're not causing a problem. The court's answering a more narrow question. The court is saying you have not proved the thing that you would need to prove to win this suit. Okay, so what happens that? So the Wyoming, Minnesota case is a very big win for wife's manufacturers. It's a win that would be bolstered by a few forensic studies that the trade organization would conduct over the next few years.

Wes Fisher, the Director of Government Affairs, and that told me about one of those studies, he said, if you wanted proof that flushable wipes were safe to flush, you could just look at the clogs themselves. We sampled 1,700 products in California at two facilities, one in northern and one in Southern California, and categorized every single wipe that came out of that system. We had a binder of every wipe we could conceivably think would be on the market in California.

there was not a single one we couldn't identify. And what did they find? In the study they find, of everything that ended up caught in a bar screen at a wastewater treatment facility, 34% of the material were wipes that were not designed to be flushed and were not marketed as flushable.

So like baby wipes. Baby wipes. 65% of the material were other non-fluscible items, paper towels, tampons, trash. An astonishingly low, 1% of the material were products marketed as flushable wipes. Only 0.9% were flushable wipes that were in the process of falling apart.

Everything else was a fully intact wipe feminine hygiene product or over 50% were paper towels. If you trust the study and if you trust that you can extrapolate it, that actually looks pretty good for them. I trust the study. They did this in collaboration with wastewater authorities. And so it's basically wastewater agencies and a clean water association coming together with the wipes trade organization to fund a study

to forensically look at a clog and they're saying, this is what we're finding. And wait, what year is this? 2023. Yeah, that looks pretty good for them. And I'll just say there's been a few studies done and these findings that this California study found

are remarkably consistent elsewhere. In every forensic study that I've seen, wipes identifiable as flushable wipes make up less than 2% of the clocks. So wait, so now you're sort of leading towards maybe these wipes are flushable. I mean, from the industry's perspective, it's like, why are you coming after flushable wipes when 99% of the issue that you guys are mad about is coming from other stuff. I find that to be kind of persuasive.

I'm not persuasive enough that I'm going to go buy flushable wipes, but I wouldn't, I think prior to knowing that piece of information, if I walked into someone's bathroom and saw that they had flushable wipes, I would think, oh, they're not being a great citizen. Yeah, you look at that study and you're like, this seems like maybe there's nothing here. Yeah. I think from the municipal wastewater perspective, though,

like I think one, maybe some of them would try to push back on the findings of those studies in some ways. Like, there's a sense that even if flushable waxes, aren't the biggest defender here at the wastewater treatment plant. Like, there's still an ingredient in the Fatbergs and the clogs and all the stuff that the wastewater folks hate dealing with further upstream. But the next big fight, and this is the decisive one, PJ, the next fight happens in Charleston in 2021.

Charleston had been dealing with the same problems that every other municipal wastewater authority had been dealing with for the previous decade, including their very own Fatberg in 2018. They reportedly had to send divers down 90 feet into raw. sewage to physically pull out the massive wipes. God. And honestly, at this point, I don't even know if they believe flushable wipes were really

a meaningful part of the problem forensically, or if they just thought that maybe flushable wipes being marketed as flushable wipes were influencing consumer behavior in a negative way. But what seemed clear is that they saw flushable wipes as the part of the problem that they could take AMAT legally and have a shot at winning because like how are you going to sue manufacturers of non-fluschable wipes? Like they're not making any claims that you disagree with. Yeah. So Charleston files a class action lawsuit on behalf of municipal wastewater authorities everywhere. Very importantly, they took a different legal strategy than Wyoming, Minnesota did. When Wyoming,

Minnesota sued for compensatory damages, they created this very difficult burden of proof. Charleston instead sues for injunctive relief, which means they're asking them, they're not saying you have to pay us for the damage you cause. They're saying to the court, please just make them stop. Yeah. They're not asking for, like, money for past behavior. They're asking for a change in future behavior. Yeah.

That lowers the burden of proof. Like, instead of having to forensically prove this white caused that bill, they only have to prove that the current flushability claims are in some way deceptive and harmful to the public interest, which is a little bit easier to get at legally. And so do they win? Well, to me, Charleston's prospects looked a lot better. than Wyoming, Minnesota's from the jump, enough so that just three months after filing the suit,

they reached a settlement with the biggest player in the game at this point, which is Kimberly Clark. Yeah. The settlement has pretty massive implications. Kimberly Clark agrees to a couple of things. One, they agree to adopt the more rigorous standards developed by clean water agencies. Oh. And two, they agreed to put much more prominent do not flush labels

on all of their non-flushable wipes, like both on the front of the package and at the point, of extraction, they agreed to put a very clear, do not flush. So non-fluschable wipes are now labeled non-fluscible wipes, and flushable wipes in the aftermath of this lawsuit have become more flushable. Huge win for municipal wastewater authorities. Congratulations to Charleston. So this looks like a brilliant move by Charleston, but it's also probably a brilliant move

by Kimberly Clark because the settlement would cost them far less than it would cost their competitors, essentially. I mean, Kimberly Clark, the biggest player in this industry, is already closer to. to meeting the more rigorous standards than all of the other wipes out there. They apparently have this proprietary technology that allows it to meet these more rigorous standards more easily than some of its competitors

had technology to do. And so by settling, this makes it a lot harder for Kimberly Clark's competitors to win the suit, because now the biggest player in the industry has just proved that this is technically workable. And so you can't say these municipal wastewater

agencies are demanding this rigorous standard that would never be possible in the real world. Kimberly Clark is saying, yeah, we can do it, we got it, catch up. Yeah. And so Kimberly Clark's competitors try to put a stop to the settlement. They try to appeal to the judge to say this is prejudicial, this settlement is inappropriate. Oh, wow. You can't do this.

And the judge is like, yes, I can. And so what that means is that the other defendants remained in suit with Charleston beyond their competitor, Kimberly Clark. In fact, dude wipes, who was not originally among the defendants, gets hit with a separate suit by Charleston after the Kimberly Clark settlement, and in 2024 and 2025, all of these other major players reach their own settlement with Charleston. Charleston Water System is celebrating a victory in a class action lawsuit that will finally hold flushable wipes companies accountable for the damage their products can cause to the pipes. Are they also adhering to the municipal standards for flushable wipes?

The terms of the settlement look very similar to the terms of the settlement by Kimberly Clark. I see. So for the past few years, the leading manufacturer was making more flushable wipes and better labeling their non-fluscible wipes, but nobody else was. What it looks like we're on the cusp of is like a brand new day where non-fleshable wipes will be better labeled. And it's possible if you believe that the standard that the cities have put forth will actually work, flushable wipes in general might be about to get more flushable. As best as I can tell, by the middle of 2026, flushable wipes marketed as flushable wipes on shelves should be, according to clean water agencies, safer to flush.

And maybe, more importantly, non-fluscible wipes are going to have a big fat do-not flush label on the packaging. It's funny, you know, sometimes I think this is a country where nothing ever gets better and we can't solve our problems, but look at us. We might be a country of lawyers, but sometimes eventually the lawyers might get right. The lawyers could do a good compromise. Yeah. Huh.

exchange for the hours of his life, he has now spent pondering the notion of what is flushable, at least one search engine listener will stop flushing baby wipes or paper towels in their toilet. Only you can prevent fatbergs. Search engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinnaminani. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Special thanks this week to Barry Orr, Cynthia Finley from Nacqua,

Angela DeLillo from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and all the folks at the Newtown Creek wastewater resource recovery facility. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarrian. This episode was fact-checked by Mary Mathis. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor,

Mora Curran, Josephina, Chris, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schiff. If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns and bonus episodes. Please consider signing up for Incognito mode at search engine.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks. Put together your summer wardrobe with Abercrombie.

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