Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Tackling ‘fatberg’ problem
SEWER systems in Scotland are being clogged by mounds of discarded items, costing £7 million a year to clear.
Worst of all is the seemingly innocuous wet wipe, the leading cause of “chokes” – these blockages cost millions of pounds a year to clear, and can create floods that damage homes and businesses.
These are also the leading cause of the infamous “fatbergs”.
These nasties grow until our Victorian-era sewers can’t cope and “choke”.
Fat, cooking oil and grease act as a binding agent on the wet wipes, bits of plastic and other carelessly dumped items, blocking the sewer system.
Contract manager Andrew McCrone said of the problem: “When we started the contract, we saw it becoming more of a prevalent issue with pump blockages.
“What we looked at is upgrading all the pumps across the network to ones that are much easier to unblock.”
The Hatton Waste Water Treatment Works outside Arbroath cleans waste water from Inchture, through Newport-on-Tay and back to Arbroath – around 50 Olympic swimming pools-worth of water passes through its pipes every day.
Dealing with blockages caused by unwanted plastic is a long-standing headache for deputy sewage works controller Jason Willmott, though there is a small silver lining.
When asked what were the strangest things he’d fished out of waste water, he said: “You get mobile phones, false teeth, underwear.
“I found a £10 note once, that went on the lottery.”
Many wipes contain plastic resins like polyester or polypropylene.
These materials don’t biodegrade, essentially making the wipes single-use plastics.
The mostly plastic-based rubbish is known as “rag” once it’s removed from the waste water – and it smells horrendous.
In fact, it smells exactly like what you’d expect a skip full of wet wipes, human hair, rancid cooking oil and plastic waste to smell like.
And that’s why Scottish Water is leading its Nature Calls campaign to clamp down on their use and, in the case of wipes containing plastic, ban them outright.
Craig Carr, performance manager at Scottish Water, said the fatberg problem has a massive effect on his customers, as well as wider impacts on both the environment and the economy.
He said: “Those chokes can cause flooding in properties, cause flooding in streets and it can also cause spills into the environment.
“That could be on the beach or in a local burn.
“So there’s an impact on the environment as well as the cost of clearing out all of the chokes.”
He added: “That’s £7m a year across Scotland.”
The campaign is doing its best to use education as a solution to the problem.