Individual gestures often have more significance than meets the eye. Especially if they are everyday and, apparently, normal and small. Getting rid of waste, for example. Something very normal and something that anyone does several times a day. Only depending on where they are deposited, they may not contribute to creating a problem or, on the contrary, create or enlarge it if it has already started.
For example, if wet wipes, hair, oils, food scraps or chemicals produced in homes are flushed down toilets or allowed to go down the drains of toilets, showers or sinks, the least that can happen is that a blockage begins in the pipes that carry this wastewater from homes to treatment plants.
That is where the process takes place to clean them of all the contamination they carry with them to return them to the natural environment clean, so that they do not cause damage or aggression to the ecosystems, which, otherwise, can be considerable. And, the dirtier the water becomes, the more energy and money it will cost to treat it.
Along the way, this waste that is thrown where it should not be can generate blockages in the buildings’ pipes, in the sewage network that carries them or in the treatment plants.
Take care of the sanitation network
Maintaining the sanitation system is not only about ensuring the good condition of the infrastructure and incorporating technology. The individual gestures made at the first point of the system, which are none other than those private toilets and drains, have their influence. For example, the Spanish Urban Water Association (DAQUAS) estimates that managing wet wipes and other textile waste that are flushed down the toilet adds an additional cost to sanitation services of 230 million euros per year. But wet wipes aren’t the only ones that create problems. Hair, although it is biodegradable, can also clog these systems, because, although it is biodegradable, it is a very slow process and, being so fine, it passes the first stages of cleaning the residual water where other solid waste is retained. The next step is purification, a biological treatment, which reduces the organic matter content of the water (nitrogen and phosphorus) based on microorganisms. After these processes, around 90% of the wastewater is free of biodegradable substances. However, the hair, although it degrades somewhat in the biological treatment, usually goes entirely to the digesters of the treatment plants. In them, the problem is that the fibrous material tends to group together forming skeins together with other waste, such as wipes, which can cause blockages and cause failures in the operation of the purifier.
Hairs in the trash
In this context, Aqualia resumes its initiative actuaraqualia.com and the campaign “Don’t get tangled: your hair in the trash” warns precisely about the problems caused by certain waste in the sanitation chain.
Not throwing wipes down the toilet and preventing a large volume of hair – which is avoided with a simple filter placed in the drain – from reaching the digesters of the treatment plants, are simple and easy habits to adopt. You can even avoid blockages in your home’s own pipes. Of course, the campaign insists, once those hairs have been collected, they must be thrown into the trash can, specifically the gray one.
Public health issue
Beyond the specific local inconveniences that a problem in the sanitation network may cause, together these systems are designed to guarantee that the entire population has access to health services safely. For this reason, the United Nations highlights, on World Sanitation Day, celebrated every November 19, the importance of sanitation and water purification services being resilient, effective and accessible to the entire population.
Something that hasn’t happened yet. The UN warns that more than 3.5 billion people still do not have access to this right, with the consequences this has for their health and their environment. Because the wastewater generated has a significant contaminant load (human waste, harmful levels of nutrients, chemicals, etc.).
But, also according to the UN, in 2022 and globally, only 58% of all dirty water generated by households was treated safely before being released into the environment. This means that a huge and growing amount of untreated wastewater is returned to nature, where it can contaminate rivers, lakes, groundwater and marine ecosystems, thus degrading nature, the quality of life and the development of regions.