Are flushable wipes actually flushable?

A simple question leads us on a journey from the bowels of New York City through the courtrooms of South Carolina to the disgusting truth. Support Search Engine! https://searchengine.supercast.com/#subscribe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 0:44PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 1:26PJ Vogt?

  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. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by the new book from Michael Lewis, Blockers. For 30 years, Michael Lewis has written about the people behind the stories in character-driven bestsellers like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Fifth Risk. Now, in his new book, Blockers, Michael Lewis tells the story of six civil servants who devoted their lives to public service that matters. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands. Another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods.

• 2:09PJ Vogt?

  Another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis. There was also a security guard. In the new Washington, these federal employees discovered that their high standards were their greatest liability. If these public servants can't survive in government today, what does that say about us? I am so excited that this new book is out. Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors. I read everything he writes, and I'm very excited for this one. Blockers by Michael Lewis. Available wherever books are sold. Learn more at blockersbook.com.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Okay, I never know how to start these things. So I'll just say, hey, PJ.

• 3:14PJ Vogt?

  Hey. What do you have? Do you have a story for me today?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  I have a story for you today. It's a story about a question that we've actually received a few times at Search Engine.

• 3:23PJ Vogt?

  What is the question?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  So it's a question that I'd seen float around the internet before, but it had never really grabbed my attention in any real way. Like, it seemed like a question that would work really well as a New York Post headline, but like, I wasn't sure there was much more to it.

• 3:38PJ Vogt?

  Is this about Hunter Biden?

• 3:39Speaker 01

  No, it's about flushable wipes.

• 3:41PJ Vogt?

  It's not a New York Post headline.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  You're reading a different New York Post than I am. So this question just never jumped out to me, but there was something about having received the same question many times that at least put it on my radar. And then we get the question in an email from a guy named Egan. You sent us an email a few months ago now, and I'm wondering if you could just read that email to us.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, do you just want me to read it verbatim?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can read it verbatim.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah, so my question is, can I flush flushable wipes or not? Every package in the store is trying very hard to convince me that I can. Meanwhile, pretty much everyone on the internet said not to. So who do I believe?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  And can I ask, like, do you use these? Have you ever used these?

• 4:27Speaker 02

  No, I don't trust them. Never have.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  You don't trust them?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  No, because all I can think about is sending these things down the plumbing, and then it gets clogged or creates some backend issue. And I've created a, you know, several thousand dollar problem for somebody. So for me, it's just not worth it.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Egan's a mechanical engineer, and he said that the engineering part of his brain suspects that the flushable claim might be like true in a lab, but not in the actual sewage system.

• 4:57PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so it's not just a question about wipes. It's a question about rules, interpretation, and whether this is one where companies are playing fair or not.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a question about all of those things, but it's also just a question about wipes. Because Egan said, he said, "Look, I've got a lot of doubts. I've seen all kinds of ways that companies can pull fast ones. But at the end of the day, I would love to use this product if it can be proven to me that they are, in fact, safe to flush."

• 5:25Speaker 02

  You know, I see the benefit, right? I can't argue with it. So I think if I heard a take that convinced me, I'm open to it.

• 5:34PJ Vogt?

  I have to say, in a moment where the country's in vast national crisis, people are very uncertain about the future, I like the word "just doing some classic podcasting" here.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  This is the question that search engine listeners are demanding that we answer, and we're heeding the call. So after I spoke to Egan, I did a lot of research, talked to a lot of people. I have what I think is a satisfying answer to Egan's question. I'm going to start that answer with something I hadn't really understood when I started working on this story, which is just like, where did the flushable wipe even come from? Like, I don't know about you, for me... I didn't know that these products existed like as recently as a few years ago. Like for me, they were nowhere and now I kind of see them everywhere. And it seemed like maybe this was like a product of the pandemic.

• 6:18PJ Vogt?

  Yes, pandemic is the first time, I don't know if I was aware that they existed. I mean, like definitely baby wipes, but like flushable wipes. I feel like the first time they probably made it onto a list of things I meant to purchase.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:29PJ Vogt?

  Was when we were wiping our groceries.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Were you wiping your groceries with flushable wipes?

• 6:33PJ Vogt?

  I was wiping my groceries with something and it, I was standing in the aisle that contained the flushable wipes.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Did you flush them after you wiped your groceries?

• 6:42PJ Vogt?

  You know, 2020, some people entered periods of greater mental clarity. Some people entered periods of greater mental fuzziness. 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 adults, like non-sweatpants for a year and a half. I was, I was living like a caveman.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I coped in a completely different, but equally insane way, which is that I ate tuna for lunch every day for two years.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I'm not entirely sure why, but it felt good and awesome. 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.

• 7:31PJ Vogt?

  When do they come into the picture?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Well, my, 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.

• 7:45PJ Vogt?

  Why vinegar?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Couldn't tell you.

• 7:47PJ Vogt?

  I think it sounds kind of nice.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  The Greeks used shards of broken pottery.

• 7:51PJ Vogt?

  I knew that actually.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Why did you know that?

• 7:53PJ Vogt?

  I happened to read a book.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:08PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so they were kind of doing their version of the sponge on a stick.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. So it wasn't until.

• 8:14PJ Vogt?

  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 that you didn't have to charge before.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:26PJ Vogt?

  I bet that like the ancient Romans and Japanese would look at us with the thin, thin ply toilet paper on our fingers and be like, why aren't you using a stick? You guys are crazy.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny, so toilet paper doesn't enter the public record until 600 AD. And this happens in China, a part of the world that famously invented paper. A few centuries later, they're, they're using it in the bathroom.

• 8:47PJ Vogt?

  First they invented paper and then they're like, why don't we wipe our butts with this?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  But they're looked down on by much of the rest of the world. They're like, look at those gross people using paper to wipe their butts.

• 8:55PJ Vogt?

  Why don't you use a stick with a cloth?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Perhaps that's what they were saying, but anyway, I don't know what you were expecting you were walking into today, but I'm going to keep just throwing toilet facts at you.

• 9:04PJ Vogt?

  Keep going.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  This trend of using paper eventually migrates to Europe where the invention of the printing press flooded the market with a whole lot of new paper that like after a while made perfectly good toilet paper.

• 9:15PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  And really, books are kind of standard issue supply of toilet paper for like centuries in most of the Western world.

• 9:22PJ Vogt?

  It's so funny because like one of the worst things you can do, I mean, there's many terrible things you can do, but one of the like sort of socially horrific things you can do is burn a book, but this whole time people are wiping their butts with them.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  You're looking at this BJ with a 2026 brain, not with a 1750 brain. In fact, in the US, the farmer's almanac specifically marketed itself for the purpose of being a great toilet paper product.

• 9:49PJ Vogt?

  So you would like read the day's forecast and be like, I'm done with this.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. If you look at a farmer's almanac, to this day, there's a hole in the top left corner of the book so that you can nail it up in your outhouse so that you can rip paper out when you need it.

• 10:01PJ Vogt?

  I could see that coming back as a trend, honestly.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Eventually, in different places at different times, people are producing paper specifically for the purpose of wiping your butt. Like toilet paper gets invented in the 1800s. And that's kind of been the status quo for the last 150 years, at least in the US. And it's not until the mid 1990s that we see the first major shakeup of toilet paper hegemony.

• 10:23PJ Vogt?

  Which is?

• 10:24Speaker 01

  So baby wipes. Been invented in the 1950s and slowly over the following decades, the parents doing the butt wiping and the diaper changing, mostly mothers, realized like, this stuff's pretty good. Maybe we should start using it for ourselves as the adults in the house.

• 10:40PJ Vogt?

  Wait, for like wiping their own butts?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  For wiping their own butts.

• 10:42PJ Vogt?

  That's so funny.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  But the big problem with this trend is that baby wipes are not flushable. They should not be flushed down a toilet. They're made of plastic-based fibers, so they're gonna create massive plumbing clogs if you try to flush them. So there's a problem here. There's a demand, and in 1996, an enterprising entrepreneur launches a product that he thinks is gonna solve the problem. He gives it the unfortunate name Moistmates.

• 11:07PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  And Moistmates is the precursor to the modern flushable wipe.

• 11:11PJ Vogt?

  Moistmates.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  I would not go to the store, see a product I've never heard of, read the label, see that it's called Moistmates, and put it in my cart.

• 11:19PJ Vogt?

  It feels like it should be locked up.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Well, when you look at it, you might feel even more strongly in that direction, because imagine a normal roll of toilet paper, except the sheets of paper are perforated wet wipe, designed to disintegrate more easily than like the classic baby wipes, but essentially what you have is wet toilet paper.

• 11:38PJ Vogt?

  Right, which is only, the only reason it's a viable possible product is because baby wipes have accidentally created a market of adult baby wipers.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And PJ, I know you're a collector of fine vintage goods. You can actually find Moistmates on eBay right now for $99.99. I'm just putting a link in there.

• 11:58PJ Vogt?

  Like $90?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  No, no, no, not $100, $99.99. And I want you to take a look at what it looks like.

• 12:05PJ Vogt?

  Okay, alright, 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 toilet paper roll with fake flour coming out of it. And then they show you what it looks like outside of the box. And it's a plastic dispenser.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  They give you, 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.

• 12:40PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:01PJ Vogt?

  And is all this, like, kind of capitalist fervor because toilet paper, even though you don't think of it as a goldmine, because we use so much of it? If you could innovate there, you know, it's just like lucre beyond your dreams?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  I think it's a huge market. If you just think about the number of people on earth using this product every single day.

• 13:22PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:29PJ Vogt?

  Got it.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  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?

• 13:39PJ Vogt?

  Of course I do.

• 13:46PJ Vogt?

  It's a bunch of people, slow motion swimmers, slow motion dancers, slow motion shot of a bunch of ladies bathing suit.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Commercials were different in 2001.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  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 clean and fresher.

• 14:05PJ Vogt?

  Ew. It's hard because you can't get past the fact that they're trying to sell you wet toilet paper.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  So you, I was eight years old in 2001. You were older than eight years old.

• 14:15PJ Vogt?

  I was older than eight years old. I was 16 and trying to make sense of a post 9/11 America.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  In your trying to make sense of a post 9/11 America, did you encounter roll wipes?

• 14:25PJ Vogt?

  No, no. Of all the things I remember from that time, and I remember a lot of things, I do not remember roll wipes.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  It's not entirely surprising to me because roll wipes don't last. They're not a smash hit. In fact, within a couple of years, they've already left the shelves.

• 14:40PJ Vogt?

  Was it just like, is your assumption, because I know this stuff is probably a little hard to historically prove, but the adult baby wipers just kept adult baby wiping and they didn't seize on any of these new weird products?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  That's a theory that I think is a perfectly good one. Another theory that I saw at the time was that like, wet toilet paper is both kind of embarrassing and very public for all of your house guests to see.

• 14:59PJ Vogt?

  No, exactly. It's like you come over to somebody's house. It's like a Seinfeld episode. Like you go into their guest bathroom and there's just a wet toilet paper dispenser.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  I don't know what you suspect, but like maybe that some sort of unfortunate medical condition is going on in that household.

• 15:11PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  But whatever the reason, flushable wipes sold as rolls basically completely failed by the mid 2000s. But the companies take the wet rolls from the shelves, but then they slowly replace them with a product that looks a whole lot more just like what we think of as the flushable wipe today, which is a flat package of wipes marketed to adults and marketed as flushable.

• 15:33PJ Vogt?

  And it comes in the sort of like, it's got the perforation on top that you reach into and you pull the thing out.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  That's right. So Charmin, Procter and Gamble owns the brand Charmin. So they buy the rights to Moistmates, rebrand them as Freshmates. And after a failed run as wet rolls of toilet paper, they get redesigned as just the classic flushable wipe we would understand today. Like you can see them in this commercial from 2005.

• 16:04PJ Vogt?

  Okay, can I already say I remember this commercial?

• 16:12PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so while the jingle is not for me and I don't care about the cartoon bear.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  I think it's kind of nice.

• 16:17PJ Vogt?

  It's fine. The thing that they're doing that is correct is the way you convince people to change a consumer product that they buy in this aisle is you convince them that they're dirty or stinky. Like, hey, not, do you want wet toilet paper, but maybe you've got a dirty butt.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I think also they're now selling you a product that is kind of covert. This isn't replacing your toilet paper roll. It's not right there where your toilet paper that's dry used to be. It's something that you can keep nice and safe on the back of your toilet and uh...

• 16:47PJ Vogt?

  People aren't gonna know you're a freak with a dirty butt who likes wet toilet paper.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:50PJ Vogt?

  Or I guess a freak with a clean butt who likes wet toilet paper. So is this the breakthrough? This is how they finally convince a mass market or some people in it to buy flushable wipes?

• 16:59Speaker 01

  It's the beginning of that story. So this is in 2005. By 2005, the thing that we understand as the modern flushable wipe has already been invented, but sales remained like pretty modest for a few years. Um, like they're, they're on shelves, but they're not flying off of them. But if you look at the market data, that changes very quickly in the early 2010s. And one reason for that might be because flushable wipes start getting some pretty strong celebrity endorsements.

• 17:24PJ Vogt?

  From who?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Uh, the actor Terrence Howard.

• 17:27PJ Vogt?

  Really?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Famously suggested that he would not date a woman that did not have wipes in her bathroom.

• 17:31PJ Vogt?

  Did he just say this in an interview or was this like sponsored?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  No, this was in an interview and it was a little questionable, I have to say.

• 17:39PJ Vogt?

  What a weird standard for Terrence Howard to have.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  He wasn't totally alone because a few years later in 2011, Will.i.am waxed poetic on the virtues of flushable wipes to Elle magazine.

• 17:48PJ Vogt?

  Huh.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  He says, quote, "Get some chocolate, wipe it on a wooden floor, and then try to get it up with some dry towels. You're gonna get chocolate in the cracks. That's why you gotta get those baby wipes."

• 17:58PJ Vogt?

  I... Different people's minds think about different things.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  I gotta say, it's, it's an effective image because I think he's probably right. I, I do think that a wet flushable wipe is better at cleaning up a mess than dry toilet paper.

• 18:11PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, well, guess what else is in the bathroom, Garrett? I think.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna use the sink to wipe my butt.

• 18:18PJ Vogt?

  No, you could just wet toilet paper yourself. You don't buy pre-wet toilet paper.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  But here's the thing. Toilet paper is designed to disintegrate immediately when it gets wet.

• 18:28PJ Vogt?

  Not if you clump it up.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  That is one of its virtues.

• 18:30PJ Vogt?

  Oh, my god.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  That is one of the things that makes it not a problem when you flush down the toilet.

• 18:34PJ Vogt?

  We have a weird culture that makes too many products, but go ahead.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  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 gonna enter the fray that a lot of people are gonna fall in love with.

• 18:48PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Do you know what company I'm talking about?

• 18:51PJ Vogt?

  Is it gendered?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  It's gendered.

• 18:53PJ Vogt?

  Dude Wipes.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 19:04PJ Vogt?

  Just a normal dude.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  He'd gone to school for construction management, working a nine-to-five, but really more of an entrepreneur at heart.

• 19:11PJ Vogt?

  I just have to say, I'm glad that you went to journalism school to do this story, because I have so often been like, what is the deal with Dude Wipes?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  I can tell you the deal with Dude Wipes.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  So I reached out to Dude Wipes to ask if someone there would talk to us. They politely declined, but the founder, Sean Riley, shows up in a lot of interviews giving his origin story.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  So tell me the story, like how you were sitting around in 2012, or I guess probably right before 2012, and with some wipes, with some buddies. So tell me how you decided that you were gonna go and disrupt an industry.

• 19:47Speaker 05

  You know, we were basically in like an animal house after college, so there was tons of guys coming through. There was, you know, five guys living there, three on the couch, and we were packing the bathrooms with baby wipes, and we just noticed everyone was getting hooked on them, you know? A couple people had used them before. I was buying them from Sam's Club, just putting in the bathroom. Like, I use baby wipes, and it became this obvious habit. People were getting this funny conversation, so we were like, let's make the brand Dude Wipes.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Sean Riley decides to launch a very loud flushable wipe brand called Dude Wipes, marketed specifically to men. And really, the innovation here isn't so much on the product side, although he will make efforts to make the wipes bigger and more durable and over time, even perhaps more flushable.

• 20:36PJ Vogt?

  It's branding.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  But the real innovation is branding. And this is why the story of Dude Wipes matters here, because the rise of flushable wipes is at its core a marketing story. It's how an entire industry convinced a lot of people to use its weird new product. And Dude Wipes is better at this than maybe anybody else.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  You know, we're coming out with butt wipes for guys. And it's like, you know, it seemed a little awkward. We're like, no, like, guys could get into this. This is obviously a cleaner way. We all believed in that. So we had to make product like different, you know, for that customer out the get-go.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  So, first few years, Dude Wipes kind of limping along like most startups do, but in 2015, they catch a big break, which is that they get a spot on Shark Tank.

• 21:19PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 21:27Speaker 05

  Hi Sharks. My name's Sean Riley, and I'm here with my good friends Ryan Meagan and Jeff Klumkowski. And we're the guys of Dude Products, hailing from Chicago, Illinois.

• 21:36Speaker 06

  But you can just call us the Dudes.

• 21:38PJ Vogt?

  Dude. And we're here today seeking- He, Sean Riley, and his two guys, they just look-

• 21:43Speaker 01

  They look like dudes.

• 21:44PJ Vogt?

  They look like dudes. They're wearing shirts that say dudes on them. One of them has a backwards hat. One of them has like, I don't want to call it a faux hawk, but that sort of faux hockey-esque haircut.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:52PJ Vogt?

  They have like, very median builds. They're just dudes. And they've got a toilet on screen that's packed high with Dude Wipes. The Sharks seem charmed.

• 22:01Speaker 07

  Sharks, are you still wiping the old-fashioned way with just toilet paper? If so, you're a chump and your ass probably hates you for it. But hey, what's a dude to do? You could try some baby wipes. But we're not babies. We're dudes.

• 22:15Speaker 06

  So we created the award-winning Dude Wipes. They're the very first wipes for, well, dudes. They're flushable, biodegradable, have soothing aloe, and the answer to every dude's prayers.

• 22:26PJ Vogt?

  Okay. So it's like, it's both that they're marketing to men, but also- They're aware that there's something funny about what they're doing and it's a little bit fun or uncomfortable to talk about. And maybe that gives it a little bit of energy that will make people pay attention to it.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:07PJ Vogt?

  I see. So when people just need wipes, they remember the brand Dude Wipes and that's like, that's like a hot moment for them.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:27PJ Vogt?

  Oh, I totally blocked that out.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:40PJ Vogt?

  I see.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And so a lot of people were introduced to flushable wipes for the first time during the pandemic, during the toilet paper shortage.

• 23:46PJ Vogt?

  I 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.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:05PJ Vogt?

  That's crazy.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:16PJ Vogt?

  It's the last wipe.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:32PJ Vogt?

  Which is what?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  They said, quote, "You wouldn't wash your face with a dry washcloth. Why would you clean your butt with dry toilet paper?"

• 24:38PJ Vogt?

  Because poop's wet.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  You're relying on the wetness of your feces to ensure that it's clean? Like, that, that argument doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

• 24:50PJ Vogt?

  You sound like a door-to-door dude wipe salesman.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  I, so I had, 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?

• 24:59PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  What are you, are you getting up, taking the toilet paper to the sink and then returning to the toilet?

• 25:11PJ Vogt?

  You bet, and-

• 25:12Speaker 01

  That is despicable.

• 25:13PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  I have used bidets and loved bidets.

• 25:22PJ Vogt?

  And by bidet, I will clarify, I don't mean like, a high-tech Japanese computer that sings, "Congratulations, You Poop Song," I mean literally even just like, the simple hose, the hose by the toilet.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Okay, so, Peter, I used flushable wipes for the first time this morning.

• 25:42PJ Vogt?

  Was it a revelation?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  I, 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-

• 25:58PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Kind of wet.

• 25:59PJ Vogt?

  It is a problem. I feel like-

• 26:00Speaker 01

  It's just not my ideal bathroom experience.

• 26:02PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:20PJ Vogt?

  Which returns us to our question.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:23PJ Vogt?

  Can you?

• 26:23Speaker 01

  I do think that I am in the minority in 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.

• 26:41PJ Vogt?

  They think an American company would lie to make money.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I, Egan, Egan the engineer, uh, is familiar with the dissonance between marketing and reality.

• 26:51PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  So 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 and city council meetings and 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.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  It's getting a little stinkier.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Ugh.

• 27:45PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Xero. Okay, you're a great small business owner, but math was never your thing. Totally get it. But if you run a small business, you know how important it is to run your numbers. Enter Xero. That's X E R O, as in X marks the spot for the perfect platform that puts accounting, payments, payroll, and analytics in one place. So you always have one clear picture of your business. Xero is more detailed than spreadsheets and just as powerful as other leading software, but it's simpler and easier to use. With visual dashboards, Xero makes it easy to understand your cash flow. You know exactly what's coming in and what's going out, so you make smarter decisions that can help grow your business without feeling overwhelmed by the numbers. Join 5 million customers worldwide who use Xero to manage their finances.

• 28:30PJ Vogt?

  Learn more at xero.com. That's X E R O.

• 28:37PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bombas. Cozy season is here, which means it's time to bring out the movie marathons, crisp morning walks, and super soft layers. Once fall hits, I genuinely just want absolute comfort on my feet, and Bombas have become a go-to for me. Their new suede moccasins are a total game changer for this weather, packed with water-resistant suede, ultra cushy soles, and a plush, sheerling lining. On those busy days, or whenever I have travel coming up, I reach for their compression socks. They offer specialized support that actively fights fatigue and aches, keeping my legs completely energized no matter how long I'm on my feet. And best of all, for every item you purchase, Bombas donates an essential item to someone experiencing homelessness, with over 200 million items donated so far.

• 29:21PJ Vogt?

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• 29:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so PJ.

• 29:45PJ Vogt?

  Yes.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  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's. 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.

• 30:29PJ Vogt?

  Does that mean like go into the sewers where the Ninja Turtles live?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  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's

• 31:00Speaker 07

  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. And 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.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  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. Like, 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 Pam Malardo to explain to me how the system worked. Like, I flushed something down the toilet. Help me follow that flush step by step. Like, what happens next? Where does it go? What happens to it?

• 31:48Speaker 07

  Thank you for asking because one of my goals in life is that every single person knows what happens after they flush.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  I'm so happy I can help.

• 31:58Speaker 07

  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.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:17Speaker 07

  Over 7,000 miles of wastewater pipes in New York City.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's the collection. And then it ends up in the treatment facility. What happens in the treatment facility?

• 32:27Speaker 07

  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.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  So 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 Malter and I actually went to visit a treatment plant. Evan, Garrett. Nice to meet you.

• 32:56Speaker 05

  Then you're the podcast crew.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 32:58Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:06PJ Vogt?

  Oh, I know. Is it the one where it's like two silver giant domes?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  They look like space age football helmets.

• 33:13PJ Vogt?

  I used to live near it. It's such a cool.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:16PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yes, it's very cool.

• 33:23Speaker 05

  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.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  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.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  So anything that can't pass through the bar screens is just getting scraped up here, basically, to discard?

• 34:06Speaker 05

  Mm hmm. Yes, just to, it gets brought to the landfill from here. Things like toilet paper will break down to the.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  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. Ah. 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.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  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. And there's also one more byproduct, which is biogas, some of which gets fed back into the system to heat homes.

• 35:10PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  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. Like, I was at this space age looking facility that knew how to turn sewage into gas that could heat your home. But Pam Malardo was probably better equipped than anyone I had yet talked to to answer this question for our listeners. 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.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  And so he just wanted to know, like, very simply, can you flush a flushable wipe?

• 36:09Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  You're the person on the other side of the system that these flushable wipes are occasionally entering.

• 36:18Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  What is your answer to that question?

• 36:21Speaker 07

  No.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Pam Malardo, former head of wastewater management and the most complicated wastewater system in the world, said unequivocally, flushable wipes, not safe to flush.

• 36:31PJ Vogt?

  Not safe to flush?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  Not safe to flush.

• 36:33Speaker 07

  No. Okay. And this is where things have changed a little bit since I was at New York City.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:40Speaker 07

  But not that much. It 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?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  You sound a little skeptical.

• 36:54Speaker 07

  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.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  You just like the rhyme of it all?

• 37:03Speaker 07

  I'm just saying the truth. Besides toilet paper, toilet paper.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:35PJ Vogt?

  What's a fatberg?

• 37:36Speaker 01

  It's a portmanteau of fat and iceberg. And 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?

• 37:53PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, please. All right, wait, I'm loading it up. 130-ton fatberg causing stink in London sewers. Oh, this is gonna be really nasty.

• 38:04Speaker 05

  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.

• 38:19PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 38:30Speaker 06

  So the fatberg is formed of a mixture of fats, oils, and greases, mixed with lots of sanitary items like wet wipes, and they congeal together to form this concrete-like blockage.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  It weighed as much as 11 double-decker buses, which is a hilariously British way to measure the weight of something. It was over 800 feet long. It took nine weeks to clear, and it cost the city a whole lot of money to clear it.

• 38:55PJ Vogt?

  And flushable wipes are like one of the ingredients that helps create a fatberg. They're like the base layer, and then it just like starts soaking up oil and fat and everything.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  That is the accusation being made by municipal wastewater officials.

• 39:10PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:32PJ Vogt?

  Right.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Your taxpayer dollars are having eventually to pay for the problems that you are creating by flushing stuff down the toilet that you should.

• 39:38PJ Vogt?

  I'm not, I'm not doing this. I'm not, I've never used a flushable wipe.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  But that's not all, PJ.

• 39:42PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  If it doesn't create a clog in a pipe, and it doesn't contribute to a mess fed berg, it can end up at the gates of a wastewater treatment plant, as we discussed.

• 39:51PJ Vogt?

  Oh, at the like border thing?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  At the front door, at the jail bars.

• 39:54PJ Vogt?

  Interesting.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:04Speaker 07

  Just from the eye test, it's 99% wet wipes. The only other thing I see is one bag of chips, and then a, you know, another piece of plastic.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  And I have to say, we saw dumpsters upon dumpsters full of what just looked like a gray 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.

• 40:29Speaker 07

  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 gonna be caused.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  You put the word flushable in air quotes there?

• 40:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, that won't come through on the audio, but yes. Uh huh.

• 40:46PJ Vogt?

  So you could see the point in the system where the flushable wipes were not flushable?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  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 gonna share with you a graph that Pam Malardo shared with me.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  I just want to see what you make of it. So Pam Malardo sent me a graph that to her is evidence that

• 41:20PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  flushable wipes are contributing to

• 41:23PJ Vogt?

  This is quite damning.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  the kinds of problems that municipal wastewater agencies are dealing with.

• 41:29PJ Vogt?

  So it's just, it's two lines. One is monthly screenings, which I guess is them having to pull stuff out of the filter screen.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 41:37PJ Vogt?

  So that goes, it 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.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  This is the point at which I need to tell you about the other side of this argument.

• 42:21PJ Vogt?

  Which is?

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Which is, there's another group of people who very much do not agree with Pam Malardo's reading of the case.

• 42:26PJ Vogt?

  Big dude wipe?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Big wipes. That's right. The wipes 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.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Viori. I have been living in my new gear from Viori, and honestly, it has completely transformed my daily routine. I picked up the Sunday Performance

• 43:23PJ Vogt?

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• 44:06PJ Vogt?

  conditions. Get 20% off your first purchase at viori.com/pj and discover the versatility of Viori clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real, lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. Vanguard's commitment to institutional quality means offering top-grade products across the board, backed by a lineup of over 80 bond funds. While other firms love to highlight a single star

• 44:47PJ Vogt?

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• 45:28PJ Vogt?

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• 46:40Speaker 01

  Can you say your name and what you do?

• 46:42Speaker 07

  My name's Wes Fisher. I'm the Director of Government Affairs for INDA, the Association of the Non-Woven Fabrics Industry.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  So to understand the other side of this debate, I got in touch with Wes Fisher, who spends a lot of his time thinking about flushable wipes, which apparently falls into a trade category called non-woven fabrics.

• 47:01Speaker 07

  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.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Wes Fisher, very good at his job. I posed him our listener question the same way I posed it to Pam Malardo. He just wanted to know very simply, can you flush a flushable wipe?

• 47:29Speaker 07

  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.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  And he said unequivocally, flushable wipes totally safe to flush.

• 47:47PJ Vogt?

  Okay.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Not surprising. It's 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, Indha created a set of standards on what a product has to do in order for it to be, quote, flushable.

• 48:07PJ Vogt?

  And is it like, how easily is it destroyed in liquid?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  That's right. Among some other things, mostly what it boils down to is how quickly is this product gonna disperse when it hits a sewage system? Municipal 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.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  And on that theory of the case, if you're trying to make sense of that graph that Pam Elardo 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're 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.

• 49:13PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  I 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.

• 49:36PJ Vogt?

  Did you start flushing all kinds of things down the toilet?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  I didn't. I'm a pretty conservative flusher.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:51PJ Vogt?

  Couldn't you test it, though? I mean, couldn't you, like, dye all the flushable wipes red or something and then figure out if they're hitting the grate?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:15PJ Vogt?

  What? Oh, it's next to Pennsylvania, Texas.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  That's right. So Wyoming, Minnesota sues the giants, Proctor and 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. 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.

• 50:52PJ Vogt?

  You can't point to a graph. You have to really...

• 50:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:06PJ Vogt?

  So did they try to?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:35PJ Vogt?

  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.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  The court is saying you have not proved the thing that you would need to prove to win this suit.

• 51:48PJ Vogt?

  Okay, so what happens next?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  So the Wyoming, Minnesota... The case is a very big win for wipes manufacturers. It's a win that would be bolstered by a few forensic studies that Enda, the trade organization would conduct over the next few years. Wes Fisher, the director of government affairs at Enda, 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.

• 52:12Speaker 07

  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.

• 52:32PJ Vogt?

  And what did they find?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:45PJ Vogt?

  So like baby wipes?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:58Speaker 07

  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.

• 53:13PJ Vogt?

  That looks pretty, if you, if you trust the study and if you trust that you can extrapolate it, that actually looks pretty good for them.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  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. And they're saying this is what we're finding.

• 53:32PJ Vogt?

  And wait, what year was this?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  2023.

• 53:35PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, that looks pretty good for them.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  And I'll just say, there's been a few studies done, and these findings that this California study found are remarkably consistent elsewhere. In every forensic study that I've seen, wipes identifiable as flushable wipes make up less than 2% of the clogs.

• 53:50PJ Vogt?

  So wait, so now you're sort of leaning towards maybe these wipes are flushable?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  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?

• 54:01PJ Vogt?

  I find that to be kind of persuasive. I'm not persuasive enough that I'm gonna 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.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you look at that study and you're like, this seems like maybe there's nothing here.

• 54:18PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:45PJ Vogt?

  Ah.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Charleston 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.

• 54:55PJ Vogt?

  Ugh.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  They reportedly had to send divers down 90 feet into raw sewage to physically pull out the massive wipes.

• 55:01PJ Vogt?

  God.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  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 AMAT legally and have a shot at winning, because, like, how are you gonna sue manufacturers of non-flushable wipes? Like, they're not making any claims that you disagree with.

• 55:35PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  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...

• 55:55PJ Vogt?

  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."

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're not asking for, like, money. For past behavior, they're asking for a change in future behavior.

• 56:06PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  That lowers the burden of proof. Like, instead of having to forensically prove this wipe 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.

• 56:23PJ Vogt?

  And so do they win?

• 56:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:37PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:47PJ Vogt?

  Oh.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:00PJ Vogt?

  So non-flushable wipes are now labeled non-flushable wipes, and flushable wipes in the aftermath of this lawsuit have become more flushable.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Huge win for municipal wastewater authorities.

• 57:09PJ Vogt?

  Congratulations, Charleston.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  So 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.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  And 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 like,

• 58:00PJ Vogt?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  We can do it. We got it. Catch up.

• 58:03PJ Vogt?

  Yeah.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 58:12PJ Vogt?

  Oh, wow.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  You can't do this. And the judge is like, yes, I can.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  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. And in 2024 and 2025, all of these other major players reached their own settlement with Charleston.

• 58:37PJ Vogt?

  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?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  The terms of the settlement look very similar to the terms of the settlement by Kimberly Clark.

• 58:54PJ Vogt?

  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. What 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.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:39PJ Vogt?

  It'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.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  We might be a country of lawyers, but sometimes eventually the lawyers might be right.

• 59:48PJ Vogt?

  The lawyers get to a good compromise.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:00PJ Vogt?

  Garrett 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.

• 1:00:56PJ Vogt?

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pinamene. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Multer is our associate producer. A special thanks this week to Barry Orr, Cynthia Finley from Naqua, 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 Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Shuff. If 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.

• 1:01:41PJ Vogt?

  Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.

• 1:02:10PJ Vogt?

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by VistaPrint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes VistaPrint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day, brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing search engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. VistaPrint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, Vistaprint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve.

• 1:02:54PJ Vogt?

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