'They pick up excrement and ball into dark nuggets': the fatbergs clogging Sydney sewers

In Sydney, the fatbergs come out from the sewers in long, matted strands, picked up and twirled on a hook like fettuccine around a fork. In London, they can be the size of 10 or 11 buses.

Formed when cooking oils and grease harden in cold water and meet with wet wipes and sanitary products, the slimy titans are choking waterways around the world.

At the Malabar wastewater treatment plant, wet wipes are a dirty word. The workers call them rags. Unlike toilet paper, a wet wipe does not break down, even after hours rafting through the sewers. They pick up excrement and ball into dark nuggets. Staff spend hours every day hacking them out of pipes and filters.

In June, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, backed up by Sydney Water, took Kleenex to court, trying to get the word “flushable” scrubbed off the packaging of their wet wipes. In a decision they are now appealing, they lost.

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For most, the word fatberg conjures up the image of mammoth, off-white cruiseships of filth made most infamous in the UK. They put one in the Museum of London and called it the “the Whitechapel Monster”. On a livestream, viewers could watch how it hatched flies, gave off moisture, grew mould and slowly changed colour.

In Australia, that still happens, on a lesser scale. “Sydney’s network is not as old as London’s,” which inhibits their growth, says Sydney Water’s Peter Hadfield. Here, they come in a range of forms.

Out in the wild, a Sydney fatberg can grow up to 1.5m. “One little nick on the pipe becomes that catch point,” Hadfield says. Five hundred tonnes of fatberg form like this every year. Small, intrepid crews are sent to break them up, costing $8m per annum.

More often, the wet wipes sluice through the system in small bundles, all the way to the treatment plants, where it becomes process controller Luke Justus’s problem.

Sometimes a big chunk of fatberg dislodges from the sewers and hits the treatment plant’s filter screens

At Malabar, Sydney Water collects six dry tonnes every day of wet wipes. In a small subterranean room, the day’s harvest is in a big tub, blackened through its journey, still sticky with oil, smelling foul.

In a test conducted by consumer group Choice in 2015, they thrashed wet wipes in an agitator with water. Toilet paper disintegrated within 2 minutes and 40 seconds, reduced to white mush. After 20 hours, the wet wipe looked the same.

“It’s a laminated plastic material, so it’s incredibly tough,” Hadfield says. “It just doesn’t break down at all.

“You can clean a barbecue grill with a wet wipe and it’ll stay,” Justus says. “It doesn’t tear apart. It’s quite difficult to cut. It’s very manual and very intense. Some of the guys have to use hydraulic claws.”

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Sometimes a big chunk of fatberg dislodges from the sewers and hits the treatment plant’s filter screens. It is like a scene from a Star Trek bridge, all klaxons and warning lights.

“Suddenly we have three or four of our screens fail on the master control system,” Justus says. They mobilise a team, with claws and rakes and shovels, to scratch at the wet wipes. The frustration is evident in Justus’s voice.

Sarah Agar, the head of policy from Choice, says the ACCC lost its case against Kimberley-Clark over a “semantic” issue. The ACCC argued that “flushable”, in the mind of the ordinary person, means something that breaks down easily and won’t cause blockages.

But Justice Jacqueline Gleeson found that there was not enough evidence to suggest that wet wipes alone were the cause of fatbergs and the plumbing problems presented in court.

“We are as equally as baffled as the public at the outcome of this case,” Agar says. “The judge took a very technical approach to see if specific product had caused blockages. But I don’t think you could find the evidence that any single wipe manufacturer was responsible.

“Choice’s view is we should instead be looking at the property of the wipes. We believe ‘flushable’ means something that will flush like toilet paper and behaves like toilet paper … I can flush my keys but I wouldn’t label them flushable.

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“I would hope that on appeal, when the court looks at this again, they take a broader view.”

According to Sydney Water, the popularity of wipes comes from a surprising source – and they blame the actor Will Smith.

“We had made an assumption that it would be young mums, with young families, with babies, who would be the primary user,” Hadfield says. “We did quite an extensive survey and it was quite interesting, the major user group of flushable wipes were young males, 15-29.

“One of the theories behind that was the rap artist and movie star Will Smith was interviewed and he said to men that they ‘weren’t really clean’ if they were only using toilet paper, they needed to use wipes.” Smith told the BBC in 2017 that using wet wipes was “special and incredible”.

“Will Smith, we hate you for what you said,” Hadfield jokes. “But he was interviewed later and actually apologised because he was concerned he’d caused a real problem with water utilities.”

For now, Justus’s life will continue to be plagued by the fatberg menace. He says he wishes that fatbergs were more fat and less wipe.

“When we think about a fatberg, it’s this image of an iceberg that is made out of fat. That is unfortunately not true – it’d be easier to manage than what it is.”