Chapter 1: What question about flushable wipes sparks this episode?
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 a salon?
That's a question I've been asking myself ever since I wrote on a website that Finders, our highest paid tier of listeners, the people I would least like to disappoint, would be invited to one, an exclusive one that I was going to host.
So what's a salon? Well, I finally looked it up.
It turns out that in the 19th century in Paris, when people wanted to discuss the ideas of the day, sometimes they'd meet at somebody's house and discuss those ideas. It was like a book club, but without a book everybody was pretending to have read. It was like a podcast, except nobody recorded it. Trees falling soundlessly in the forest. What is our salon going to be?
If you're a finder, you get to find out. Here's what I can promise. It's not a podcast live show where I'm on stage laughing like a stupid chipmunk. And it won't be big. It will be a small, intimate group. We'll meet somewhere interesting. There will be cheese. There will be wine. And yes, you can bring a friend.
If you want to join us for our inaugural salon, in which we will definitively answer together the question, what is a salon? Join us in New York City on March 20th. If you are now or at any point in the past, if you have been a finder, you will have gotten an email inviting you.
If you are not a finder and if you would like to become one, if you join by February 14th, Valentine's Day, you will get an email invitation to our first ever salon. You can join by going to searchengine.show, signing up for incognito mode and choosing finder. All right, after these ads, our show this week.
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Chapter 2: How do flushable wipes impact wastewater systems?
I was a fuzzy guy. My guess is that I was flushing everything down my toilet. I was real, like, the world's ending, there's no rules.
I didn't wear adult... 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 I lost some weight.
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, flushable 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 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. Okay.
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... 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.
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Chapter 3: What historical context surrounds the invention of flushable wipes?
eBay.
MoistMates dispenser, 80 sheet roll, rare, vintage. The packaging's pretty good. Flushable, hypoallergenic with aloe. It looks like lily pads, but I guess it's an aloe plant. And then a toilet paper roll with fake flower coming out of it. And then they show you what it looks like outside of the box. And it's a plastic dispenser.
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 roll 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. Yeah. 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 Cottonelle 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, it's just like lucre 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 I do.
It's a bunch of 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. Introducing Cottonelle Fresh Roll Wipes. Together with dry toilet paper, these new pre-moistened wipes on a roll leave you feeling cleaner and fresher. 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 eight years old in 2001.
You were older than eight years old. I was older than eight 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.
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Chapter 4: What are the legal battles surrounding flushable wipes?
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 butt.
No, you could just wet toilet paper yourself. You don't have to buy pre-wet toilet paper.
But here's the thing. Toilet paper is designed to disintegrate immediately when it gets wet.
Got it.
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, 27-year-old guy named Sean Riley living in Chicago decides to launch his own flushable wipe product. Sean Riley, just a normal dude. Just a normal dude. He'd gone to school for construction management, working a nine to five, but really more of an entrepreneur at heart.
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Chapter 5: How do marketing strategies influence consumer perceptions of flushable wipes?
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. 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. You sound like a door-to-door dude by yourselves, man. 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. And 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. Was 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.
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Chapter 6: What evidence supports the claims about flushable wipes and clogs?
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. It's such a cool... Yes. The building looks like it's like sort of like Area 52 or something.
And 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. 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? Mm-hmm.
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. 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, right?
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Chapter 7: What are the differing opinions on the safety of flushing wipes?
So 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 should have. I'm not doing this. I've never used a flushable wipe. But that's not all, PJ. Oh. If it doesn't create a clog in a pipe,
and it doesn't contribute to a massive 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. 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 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. 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 Pam Alardo 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 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. That's right.
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Chapter 8: What conclusions can we draw about flushable wipes and their future?
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 kind 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 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 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.
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-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. Everything else was a fully intact wipe, feminine hygiene product, or over 50% were paper towels.
That looks pretty, if you trust the study and if you trust that you can extrapolate it, that actually looks pretty good for them. And 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.
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