Under the bright lights inside an underground lab at Ryerson’s urban water centre, Darko Joksimovic grabs a small box of facial wipes from a shelf. He reads a label on the box out loud: “100 per cent biodegradable.” He laughs. “Just another source of plastics in the environment,” says Joksimovic, a civil engineer and associate professor in the department of water resources.The wipe in question is labelled “flushable,” but when flushed it gets stuck in the lab’s toilet pipe and, after Joksimovic flushes again and again, is still intact and does not fully decompose at the end of the cycle.It’s a scenario all too familiar for Joksimovic. Consumers in Canada and all over the world are sending wipes through sewer systems that should instead be put in garbage cans, according to a recent Ryerson study. These products are clogging pipes, which is costly for cities and damaging for the environment. Industry experts say there are hardly any government regulations to prevent manufacturers from labelling these products “flushable.”Earlier this year Joksimovic supervised a team of fellow researchers — led by Barry Orr, a Ryerson researcher with a focus on water and sewer issues — who spent months testing the flushability and disintegration of various single-use wipes and tissues.In the lab, they created a replica of a typical urban home’s bathroom plumbing including a toilet. Researchers would put a wipe in the bowl, flush it and observe its movement through the pipe — based on parameters from the International Water Services Flushability Group, an organization of water associations, utilities, and professionals that aims to provide clear guidance on what should and should not be flushed. There were two parts to the test: determining how easily the wipes flushed down the toilet and moved through plumbing system; and how well the product disintegrated, if at all.Various products were tes ...
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