500-tonne gross find in Aussie sewerage

News.com.au

09-06-2025

A simple household act many Aussies consider totally fine is costing them and their state thousands of dollars and hours every year to repair.
Flushing wet wipes down the toilet continues to plague state water departments, with hundreds of tonnes of the product being removed from systems every year.
Flushed wipes can easily block household drainage systems and cost Aussie homeowners more than $1000 in plumbing bills.
But it's the wipes that make it off the property and into the state systems that cause even bigger problems.
Known as 'fatbergs', huge clumps of wipes that have melded together are extracted from state systems every year.
The biggest cluster of wet wipes removed from a system was recorded in 2024 when a 42-tonne 'fatberg' was discovered in Victoria.
It weighed two tonnes more than the average petrol tanker and took workers nine hours to dislodge and remove from the sewer.
Another, discovered in 2016 in NSW's Hunter Region, involved a one-tonne ball of wipes was removed from local sewer pipes.
Almost 75 per cent of the one-tonne cluster was removed with specialised equipment from a station at Eleebana while the remaining 25 per cent was removed by hand using buckets.
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'Wet wipes are responsible for around 80 per cent of all sewer blockages in Hunter Water's system,' Hunter Water Corporation spokesman Nick Kaiser said at the time.
'These can cost thousands of dollars to repair and if they occur in people's private plumbing that cost is worn by the customer.'
Following the Eleebana incident the Water Services Association of Australia estimated flushed wipes were costing water departments nationwide $25 million per year.
Sydney Water claims it removes more than 500 tonnes of wet wipes from its 24,000km of pipes, 680 pumping stations and 29 wastewater treatment and recycling plants every year.
At the heart of the issue is false advertising where wipe manufacturers claim the synthetic wipes are flushable.
This leads Aussie to think it's fine to flush them down the toilet without realising they actually don't dissolve like toilet paper and can take many years to break down.
Once in the sewerage systems, wipes combine with fats and other substances to form the massive 'fatberg' clumps decimating systems.
In Victoria, Yarra Valley Water said it spends nearly $1 million each year to clear about 1200 blockages caused by wipes.
Yarra Valley Water said it retrieves almost 14 tonnes of wet wipes and rags from sewer system in any given week.
Meanwhile, South Australia marked 2024 as its worst year on record for wet wipe issues – more than 1600 blockages were recorded in Adelaide in a single year.
In Queensland, Urban Utilities remove about 120 tonnes of wet wipes each year, costing the state about $1 million.