The Current - This summer, Metro Vancouver was overwhelmed by ‘fatbergs’

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Fatbergs are causing costly plumbing issues and sewage overflow in Metro Vancouver. These rock-like masses of waste form when fat, oil and grease are mixed with non-biodegradable items like wet wipes – which is why wastewater experts want us to think twice about what we put down the toilet and drain.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Rinse out an almost finished bottle of salad dressing with warm water. Add a bit of grease from the chicken you fried for dinner and throw in some yogurt that's just past its due date. Wash it all down your kitchen sink, repeat it every few days, and tell your neighbors to do the same. Bingo! You have a starter recipe for a fatberg. So the pieces of grease are accumulation of fats,, oils and grease. It hardens when it enters our wastewater system and forms almost like a concrete-like structure. And that's what we call a fatberg.

There was so much of that hardened concrete-like fat in the sewers in Metro Vancouver that this summer these fatbergs overwhelmed parts of the infrastructure. So we've spent the last two months breaking that up and removing it with high pressure water jets and vacuum trucks and so far we've pulled out about 50 tons of grease. It's cost us almost a million dollars today. I mean this is certainly the largest chunk that we've found in recent years. They can be as big as a large-sized table, and it's broken off the sewer main, and it ends up at our plants. And June was the breaking point when large chunks started arriving at our wastewater treatment plants. And this was the breaking point for our system, where our system could no longer handle it.

Dana Zheng, Eugene Young, and Peter work in Metro Vancouver's water treatment system. They gave our producer Ann Penman a tour of the Lulu Island plant. This inside here is where we have our bar screens, which screen the large debris that's incoming to our plant. This is the first treatment process that the wastewater goes through when it reaches Lulub. So as you can see, the system isn't designed to handle very very large objects like the fatbergs that came in over the summer. Those fatbergs caused a lot of strain on this

system and we can go over here and just take a look that the conveyance system of the screenings was also overwhelmed with the grease because inside the conveyance system is a screw which with all the incoming grease the actual screw auger was getting coated with grease so then it was unable to move any material because it was just so oily and slick I know that's fat that just dropped in there and looked like big rocks yeah so those those could be peace those are pieces of grease but they're they're a lot smaller and those pieces, those are okay. We can deal with that.

It's the large, extremely large, like table-sized pieces that our system is not made to handle. Solid pieces of debris accumulate in our walls of sewer pipes and can really cause havoc with our sewer networks and our wastewater treatment plants. When you say havoc, what does that mean? So we call fats, oils and grease fog for short, F-O-G. And when fog collects on our sewer pipes over time, it can reduce the capacity of our sewer pipes, which can cause sewer backups into homes and businesses onto the street and this can be very harmful. So we're looking at the screenings and it's a mixture of fog pieces.

I see some rags, which it's hard to tell in this decomposed state that they are in right now, but they're mostly so-called flushable wipes, paper towels. I see a floss pick. We see some little bits of plastic. So these are all things that people may think is okay, so you put down the drain or flush down the toilet, but it really does not decompose and it enters into our system and we need to manually remove these items. In this bin you can see it's not the most pleasant thing to look at or

smell. It's quite an odour to it. When we remove these large chunks of grease from the system, we take them to one of the treatment plants that has a digester facility where it's actually processed into biogas, which is then beneficially reused in the plant for their energy purposes. So we try and recover what we can out of the problem, but we would still much rather not be removing it in the first place. Barry Orr is an international expert on fat soils in Greece, or FOG. He's with the National Municipal Enforcement Sewer Use Group and the Canadian member of the International Water Services Flushability Group.

In those circles, he's also known as Captain Fog. Barry Orr is in our Victoria studio. Good morning. Oh, good day, Susan. Captain Fog, I'm honored to be speaking with you. How common is it for Canadian cities to have a problem with fatbergs in sewers? Oh, right across the nation, you're seeing more and more of those fatbergs lingering in our sewer system. We heard, you know, figures in the millions, one of our commentators saying to clean up this stuff.

What does it cost? Well, the Municipal Enforcement Sewer Use Group has done an estimate, and we have looked at this cost across Canada, and the estimate is about $250 million a year to remove this material and other garbage-like pieces. You know, Barry, we have so many problems with our infrastructure. We talk about it all the time.

This is one people don't probably think about. Can it handle any amount of fog? No. And very simply, a little is a lot. simply a little, is a lot. What could happen if we continue this pattern of putting these things down our sewers and our sinks? Well, we like to look at this as a source control or a pollution prevention initiative.

And so if we can eliminate or reduce the amount of, say, grease or garbage getting into the sewer systems, then our system performs better and it's not a financial burden to us as the ratepayers. You know, I confess, I probably shouldn't, that I hadn't heard this term fatberg much. It entered the Oxford Dictionary in 2015. I'm guessing that this is a problem worldwide in sewers. So what's happening to cause so much attention now on this impact of fat soil in Greece? Well, now I can tell you that COVID had an immense impact on the sewer system and the amount of garbage and grease entering it. So, you know, before COVID, we were doing pretty good on educating the public and trying to keep things out of the sewer system. And then we got inundated. We were getting wipes and gloves and grease and all kinds of garbage that just came through during the

pandemic. You know, like sometimes we even were ending up with shirts and bandanas being flushed down. I just don't understand how that stuff is getting there, but it is getting there. And it's troubling to see all this garbage and continually coming down. And so it bothers me greatly that the people are using the toilet as a garbage can. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called on drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons,

but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcasts. We heard in some of that tape from a guy cleaning it up who said that there were table-sized pieces of fog. What's the biggest fatberg you've ever heard of?

Well, I've heard over in the UK about some very large fatbergs, and I actually was in the UK to see the Whitechapel fatberg in the Museum of London there. So myself, I've been working in the sewer systems for almost 30 years, and I've had fatbergs this size of large cars that we've had to break apart. So, yeah, I've seen a lot of them. Gosh, remind us the UK one. It was very long, 230 meters or something? Yeah, it was like, I think if I remember correctly, it was like 10 double-decker buses.

So big they put it in a museum. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, they just took a little chunk and put it under the lights. And there was a candy bar wrapper sticking out of it and hair. And so anyways. What overall is the environmental impact of these fatbergs? First off, you know, you got to think about fats are a resource. think about fats are a resource. If we can get the fats into anaerobic digestion, then they produce more methane gas. And then that methane gas can usually be harnessed and used

either in the natural gas system being injected or creating green energy. So it's really important for us to try to capture, it's like I call it the liquid gold, because bacon fat, you know, it's very valuable for cooking, but it's also very valuable in the anaerobic digestion process. But also, there is a factor here that if, you know, and we don't want it down the sinks or in the toilets or whatnot, but if you put it in the garbage, then it goes to a landfill and the landfill produces methane gas off of that. And methane gas we know is 30 times more detrimental than the carbon dioxide. So why wouldn't you give it to us? You know, why wouldn't you give it to a company that can create biodiesel, for instance? So I think of it as a resource, and if we thought of it as a resource, then we can protect our sewer system and protect your own pipes.

I don't think it sounds like liquid gold. I know you're passionate, but it sounds pretty awful. I suppose part of this idea, and it's an interesting one, is how do you collect it? What are you telling Canadians? What should we be doing with this stuff in our kitchen? Well, in the city of London, we actually had a cup that was a completely degradable cup that we gave to our citizens to put their fat, soils, and grease in it. degradable cup that we gave to our citizens to put their fat, soils and grease in it. And then we would ask them to bring it to our special waste or enviro depots

where we could get it to an anaerobic digestion site. We handed out over 150,000 cups to our residents. We took a scenario where 40% of our blockages in the city of London were related to fat soils in Greece. We took it down to a seven-year zero blockage scenario. And when you put the dollars and cents to it, we were saving our citizens over $500,000 just by having this cup program. And so there's lots of simple ways to deal with it. Put it in a cup, put it in, say, a coffee mug with tinfoil, and you dump it in there and then put it in the fridge or the freezer. And when it hardens up, you put it into your green bin. Take a paper towel and

wipe out the pans of greasy material before you wash them. Right there, you're reducing the amount of grease that gets down in the drain by about 90%. We have a large compost in our backyard in Toronto. Can I put the frozen, I mean, isn't that going to attract vermin? Yeah, don't do that because we don't encourage that. In Toronto, you've got a green bin, so get it into the green bin. Or, you know, some of these municipalities have started collecting quantities at the special waste steeples and that. And so they might be able to turn it into biodiesel.

Especially, there is a lot of people using cooking oil now to cook with. And if you get that used cooking oil into a recycling stream, it can be turned into biodiesel. So there's lots of things we can do. I can remember one story about, you know, somebody was cooking a turkey and he said, yeah, you know, we soaked the pan berry and I would never dump it down the sink. I take that right over to the toilet. So there's a disconnection on understanding our plumbing system and there's simple steps that we can all take. I confess again, I'm guilty of that. The sink and the toilet, it's the same problem, right? Totally. I'm so glad, Susan, that you mentioned this because, yeah, and that's what I think we have to do better as municipalities is we have to help educate the citizens on this awesome system that's under the ground.

It's hidden, but it's protecting us. It's cleaning the waters, right? And so see how simple we can make change if we all connect into better habits. I'm going to go home and tell all my family, stop doing this. Yeah. No toilet. That is the way it has to be, is it has to be word of mouth. It has to be spread around in having a conversation. It seems to be, yeah, nobody wants to have the toilet talk, but maybe you have to have a toilet talk. You're a great advocate and you're headed to this National

Water and Wastewater Conference in Winnipeg. So are fatbergs part of the agenda there? I'm going to talk about flushability around those so-called flushable wipes and how we're trying to get a standard in place that if you're going to label something flushable, it must meet the wastewater's sectors, specifications, or testing criterias. And this is what we're having a real problem with is that there's many products being labeled out there that are flushable and they haven't met a standard for flushability. And that's what we're working on. And that's what I'm going to talk about. Why is that difficult? I mean, they don't look like they're flushable to me.

Well, technology has changed. Previously, oh, way back in the early 2000s, they were manufacturers of wipes were taking baby wipes and baby wipes back in the day were specifically single-use plastic items made with these fibers. They would cut them down to size. So by cutting them down, they then said they were flushable. And so then we started seeing a lot of problems at our pumping stations and wastewater treatment plants with these wipes clogging pumps and everything. And so we started looking into it with the manufacturers and found, well, these actually aren't flushable and we need some criteria or a standard around it.

So we've been trying to work with the manufacturers of many wipes right across the globe on dispersibility or degrading or however you want to say these falling apart pieces is what we need. And so it's been a challenge. Before I let you go, one last consumer question. You know, a lot of people look at the fat after, you know, frying something up and put it down their sink and say, well, a little hot water, that'll make it all go through. Is that another myth? and say, well, a little hot water, that'll make it all go through.

Is that another myth? 100%, because remember, hot water cools, and as soon as that starts to cool, it can solidify in your pipes, but then it can also solidify in our sewer system. And so at the end of the day, keep it out of the system, please. Thank you so much, Barry. Thank you. Barry Orr is the Canadian representative for the International Water Service Services Flushability Group, and he is the spokesperson for the Canadian

Municipal Enforcement Sewer Use Group. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.