According to the City of Wyoming, INDA’s seven “flushability” tests fail to simulate real-life conditions in a sewer system. One test, the “slosh box” disintegration test, for example, places a wipe in a tank filled with two liters of water that rocks back and forth for 3 hours. The fibers that remain must then be able to pass through a 12.5-millimeter sieve. But a wet wipe often reaches a sewage pump in a couple of minutes, wastewater officials argue. And many sewer systems are not nearly as hard on the wipe as the agitation test. In 2013, Consumer Reports conducted an independent agitation test that none of the leading four wet wipes (Charmin, Scott, Cottonelle, and Equate) could pass. The wipes also failed to break apart after being beaten for 10 minutes in a kitchen stand mixer on the lowest speed.

Dave Rousse, the president of INDA, claims that the flushability tests are satisfactory and that the industry sufficiently regulates itself. He says that INDA calls companies whose wipes don’t pass the seven tests and informs them that their product can no longer be labeled flushable. While he sympathizes with Wyoming’s sewage maintenance problem, he considers their lawsuit “misguided.” Their problem, he contends, is caused by consumers flushing baby wipes—which, unlike the new wave of adult wet wipes, are still meant to be thrown in the garbage—and other non-flushable products like tampons, dental floss, and condoms.

In July, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, Nice-Pak, and the three other wet-wipe manufactures named in the suit requested that the City of Wyoming save and archive all of its clogged sewage for 180 days to be used as evidence. This would amount to collecting and storing hundreds of tons of raw sewage. Last week, the judge ruled that Wyoming must collect, photograph, and videotape a third of all its sewage clogs over the 180-day span, but that it could dispose of the sewage after seven days.

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Wyoming is not alone; sewerage authorities across the country are frustrated with INDA’s flushable standard. In 2012, wastewater associations like the Water Environment Federation tried to work with INDA to establish a new, more rigorous standard, but INDA didn’t show a working draft to them until two weeks before publication at the World of Wipes conference in 2013. The sewerage authorities were dismayed to find that the pass/fail criteria was two to three times more lenient than it had been in the previous guidelines, published in 2009.

“It’s become clear that the manufacturers are not the people that should be telling us what is acceptable and not acceptable in our sewer systems,” says Rob Villee, the executive director of the Plainfield Area Regional Sewerage Authority, in New Jersey.

Villee estimates that wet wipes are costing billions of dollars a year in worldwide maintenance. “This is an international problem,” he says. “This isn’t the United States, this isn’t Canada. It’s England. It’s Spain. It’s Australia. It’s Israel, France.”