I know what you flushed last summer

A sticky situation solved with minimum resources

To coincide with the 2015 release of the latest Jurassic Park movie, a T-Rex-inspired poster was published to promote Keep Wipes Out Of The Pipes/ Image: Sydney Water

Faced with a sticky problem costing customers thousands each year, a tiny communications team with no budget had to use all their ingenuity and creativity to to kick start an international movement on wet wipes.

Sydney Water is Australia’s largest water utility company and services 4.8 million customers across an operational area of over 12,000 square kilometers. In 2014 Sydney Water was seeing an increasing trend in faults at our sewage pumping stations. The cause of these faults was largely contributed to by our customers flushing wet wipes. In the past two years alone, Sydney Water has removed over one million kilograms of wet wipes from the 675 pumping stations in our 25,000 kilometer network at an annual cost of over six million US dollars. Wet wipes blockages were also contributing to environmental problems by creating overflows into creeks and waterways. These overflows are a general public health risk and there is a safety risk to our staff who have to remove wipes from our network.

We didn’t know why customers were flushing wipes so we commissioned a research study. In summary the research found:

  • Over 12 per cent of all wipes products are estimated to be flushed.
  • Approximately one in four of the total Sydney population over 15 years of age, almost one million Sydney residents, were flushing wipes
  • The survey showed that if customers perceive products as ‘flushable’ or biodegradable, they are twice as likely to flush them.

 The survey also found 25 per cent of respondents indicated they would reduce wipes usage after knowing their environmental impact.We also did our own testing with laboratory equipment to compare the flushability results being promoted by the flushable wipes manufacturers and their reality. Some wipes brands were claiming three hours for their flushable wipes to break down. We stopped the test in our labs at 21 hours and the so-called flushable wipes hadn’t broken down at all. Some of the flushable wipes manufacturers were also claiming on their packaging that flushable wipes break down in the same manner as toilet paper. With the insight of our testing and research, the Keep Wipes Out Of The Pipes programme was launched in mid-2015.

Challenges

Before we rolled out the campaign we were acutely aware that we faced a few problems: we had to overcome an entrenched behaviour of customers exposed to the ‘flushable’ packaging and marketing by wet wipes manufacturers. We had to bring an issue that exists mainly underground into everyday consciousness, converting an ‘out of sight, out of mind issue’ into one of everyday relevance.

Peter Hadfield

Prior to taking on his current role as senior media and public relations advisor at Sydney Water in January 2014, Peter Hadfield was chief operating officer at Australian Children's Music Foundation, and before that executive officer at Centennial Parklands Foundation. He has also worked as marketing communications manager for Australia Post. With over 30 years’ experience in communications, Peter has also represented Australia at two Olympic Games in the Decathlon.