Are flushable wipes actually flushable?

22:38And 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 from 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.

23:11And 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 low on 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. Like they were still there 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.

23:47I 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.

24:16It'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. Dude Wipes 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 me.

24:50You sound like a door-to-door dude wipes houseman. 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. What are you, 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 bidets.

25:22And by bidet, I will clarify. I don't mean like a high-tech Japanese computer that sings a 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.

25:42Was it a revelation? Well, 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 bidets. 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.

26:20Which 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. Egan the engineer is familiar with the dissonance between marketing and reality. Okay.

26:54So, 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, in city council meetings, in local governments. In courtrooms? Courtrooms. 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. Ugh.

28:05See you next time. in their Shop Appotaker app. Hi, I'm Mike Peska, host of The Gist, the longest running daily news and analysis podcast. If you want a podcast that's informed, uncompromising, and defies the echo chamber, you'll like The Gist. In each 30-ish minute episode, I tackle politics, culture, and unexpected things like America's dive into sports betting or a conversation with a prison consultant, Harvey Weinstein's in fact, on how to prepare for time behind bars. I strive to bring you sharp analysis and sharper wit every weekday. So listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

28:50Okay, 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 longtime 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 City. 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.

29:36Does 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 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.

30:18And 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 that 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. 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 Pamela Lardo to explain to me how the system worked. I flushed something down the toilet. Help me follow that flush step by step. What happens next? Where does it go?

30:54What 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 happy I can help. 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.

31:32What 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.

31:50So PJ, I took Pam's moral imperative seriously. Hey, how's it going? Hello, I'm Evan. I'm going to be doing some of the tour today. Search engine producer Emily Malterra and I actually went to visit a treatment plant. Evan Garrett. Nice to meet you. 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 wastewater. 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 like sort of like Area 52 or something.

32:26And the first time you find out it's wastewater treatment, 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.

32:59why 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 tampons, 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.

33:37I 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.

34:11And 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, whether they realize it or 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.

34:47Like I was at this space age looking facility that knew how to turn sewage into gas that could heat your home. But Pamela Ardo was probably better equipped than anyone I had yet talked 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, like 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?

35:27No. Pamela Ardo, 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. 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. 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.

36:07You just like the rhyme of it all? I'm just saying the truth. Besides toilet paper. Toilet paper is good. So, Pam described the kinds of problems flushable 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 fatbergs. What's a fatberg? It's a portmanteau of fat and iceberg.

36:46And a fatberg is when fats, oils, and greases that end up in our wastewater system combine with non-biodegradables like wipes to create a very disgusting clog. Can I show you one? Yeah, please. All right, wait, I'm loading it up. 130-ton fatberg causing stink in London sewers. Oh, this is going to be real nasty. Below the surface of England's capital city lies a dark and disgusting problem. It smells pretty unpleasant. In the 150-year-old sewers of East London, a huge mass of 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 pipe, but it looks like somebody made ice cream out of like fat feces and sludge.

37:36So 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's 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 fatberg. They're like the base layer, and then it just starts soaking up oil and fat and everything. That is the accusation being made by municipal wastewater officials.

38:17So flushable wipes, 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 borne 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 were creating by flushing stuff down the toilet that you shared. I'm not doing this. I've never used a flushable wipe.

38:48But that's not all, PJ. Oh. If it doesn't create a clog in a pipe and it doesn't contribute to a mass fatberg, 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, you know, another piece of plastic. And I have to say, we saw dumpsters upon dumpsters full of what just looked like a great mass of white-looking things.

39:28This is just at one facility. The waste water 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 caused. 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.

40:02Clear 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 Pamela Lardo shared with me. Okay. And I just want to see what you make of it. So Pamela Lardo sent me a graph that to her is evidence that flushable wipes are contributing to the kinds of problems that municipal wastewater agencies are dealing with. So it's two lines. One is monthly screenings, which I guess is them having to pull stuff out of the filter screen.

40:43That's right. So that goes, it's sort of hockey sticks up, and 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, like, 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 rise in sales of flushable wipes and these clogs. You have the former head of the wastewater in New York City saying the wipes are a problem, and then you're seeing with your own eyes the grate that's supposed to keep non-flushable things out of the treatment, and it's filled with wipes of unknown origin.

41:24This is the point at which I need to tell you about the other side of this argument. Which is? Which is, there's another group of people who very much do not agree with Pamela Ardo's reading of the case. Big dude wipe? Big wipes. That's right. The wife's 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.

42:33Transcription by CastingWords More Infos under sead.de and by your Sead-Partner. The Insolvenzzahlen steigen. What's under this development and what's for the middle of this? In Folge 6 of the end of the insolvenment, Patrick Ludwig Hansch, the leader of the research for credit reform, why the models are now faster than their borders. And why the insolvenment so hard they are, is to make a function of the market. In the podcast channel, good businesses from credit reform. Everywhere, where there are podcasts.

43:31Fisher, 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 textiles 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 Pam Milardo. 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.

44:19And he said unequivocally, flushable wipes, totally safe to flush. Okay. Not surprising. a longstanding position in a longstanding 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.

44:55Municipal 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 standard that they say products should have to meet in order to be called flushable. But the kicker is 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.

45:31And 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 flushing paper towels. Like, you just opened the door.

46:00I 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 2020s. Did you start flushing all kinds of things down 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.

46:28Couldn't you test it, though? I mean, couldn't you dye 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 damages. 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.

47:18But 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... 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 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, It doesn't really think about that ahead of time.

47:52They 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.

48:20The court is saying you have not proved the thing that you would need to prove to win this suit. Okay, so what happens next? So the Wyoming, Minnesota case is a very big win for wipes manufacturers. It's a win that would be bolstered by a few forensic studies that INDA, the trade organization, would conduct over the next few years. Wes Fisher, the director of government affairs at INDA, 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.

49:02We 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-flushable 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.

49:39Everything else was a fully intact wipe, feminine hygiene product, or over 50 % were paper towels.

49:50That looks pretty, 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.

50:21In 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 leaning 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 like 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.

50:52Yeah, 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 wipes aren't the biggest offender 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.

51:24Charleston 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 mass of 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 aim at legally and have a shot at winning?

52:07Because, like, how are you going to sue manufacturers of non-flushable wipes? Like, they're not making any claims that you disagree with. 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 caused. They're saying to the court, please just make them stop.

52:38Yeah. 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.

53:15Yeah. 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-flushable wipes are now labeled non-flushable wipes. And flushable wipes in the aftermath of this lawsuit have become more flushable. Huge win for municipal wastewater authorities. Congratulations, Charleston.

53:48So 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 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.

54:29And 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. 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.

55:09And 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-flushable wipes, but nobody else was.

55:39What it looks like we're on the cusp of is like a brand new day where non-flushable wipes will be better labeled. And it's possible if you believe like 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-flushable wipes are going to have a big fat do not flush label on the packaging.

56:16It'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 can do a good compromise. Yeah. Huh.

56:38Garrett Graham. He's the senior producer on our show. His hope is that in 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.

57:05Thank you.

57:33Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Truthy Pinnimaneni. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Moltero is our associate producer. A special thanks this week to Barry Orr, Cynthia Finley from NAQWA, 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 Armin Bazarian. 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 Miranda, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schoff.

58:09If you'd like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes. Please consider signing up for Incognito Mode at searchengine.show. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.

58:28Thank you.