Are Flushable Wipes Really Flushable? - Consumer Reports (2025)

What Are the Environmental Dangers of Flushing Wipes?

Imagine this: You’re a wastewater treatment plant operator answering an emergency call at 2 a.m. to clear out a pump at a treatment center that’s blocked up and clogged with flushable wipes. You have to lift the pumps out, reach your hand inside, and physically pull up these wipes—along with grease, toiletries, and other hazardous materials (these mixtures are sometimes called fatbergs). You also have to work fast: A blockage could cause a sanitary sewer overflow, where the sewer system could overflow to a nearby brook or stream.

According to Howard Carter, president of the board of trustees at the Water Environment Federation (WEF), a nonprofit established in 1928 that works to protect public health and the environment, this isn’t just a nightmare scenario—it’s a reality for these workers. Carter tells CR that workers can be on call any given night, and it’s not unusual to get calls at 2 a.m. because of pumps blocked by wipes. “We try to keep up with these things by engineering different products to help, but it’s just a very, very expensive endeavor,” Carter says. These costs, part of the NACWA’s estimate of $441 million a year in operating costs to deal with wipes in sewage systems, range from investing in new technologies to track the level of water in pipes and manholes due to blockages from wipes, to investing in new pumps that will actually cut up the wipes. “These are all extra capital costs associated with increased staff time to monitor and remediate,” Carter says.

Some single-use flushable wipes are made from cellulosic fibers such as wood pulp, cotton, and rayon, but many contain “property-enhancing chemical additives.” These artificial fiber parts can be produced from plastics like polyester and polypropylene and affect their ability to degrade in water. This negatively impacts aquatic life.

“Environmentally, though these flushable wipes do break down into smaller pieces when flushed, it still adds more things”—the wipes’ material—“to the water that not only your wastewater treatment facilities have to clean out but also your drinking water treatment plants,” says Shanika Whitehurst, associate director for Consumer Reports’ Product Sustainability, Research, and Testing team. “Fewer things added to the water means fewer things that have to be treated out, and clean water is something we use daily.”

Removing certain synthetic substances from water isn’t even feasible. When it comes to things like microplastics or PFAS, Carter says, “We just don’t have the technology to treat those things right now.”

Water pollution from wipes is a significant concern. After discovering a fatberg in London’s Whitechapel sewer in 2017 that weighed 286,601 pounds and measured 820 feet in length, and in which wet wipes were a major culprit, scientists discovered that where there were high densities of wet wipes in the River Thames, there were also lower numbers of Asian clams. The reason the Asian clam was observed is that it has also been studied in Chinese rivers to monitor plastic pollution through the ingestion of microplastics (these creatures are efficient filter feeders, which means they take advantage of moving water and extract small pieces of food and other particles from the water). According to the World Wildlife Fund, wildlife ingests wet wipes or the microfibers they release as they decompose, and the plastic stays in their stomachs or fills them up so that they can’t eat other food and starve to death.

“When flushed, wet wipes often find their way into our waterways and eventually flow into the ocean,” says Britta Baechler, director of ocean plastics research for Ocean Conservancy and a scientist who has studied the impacts of microplastic pollution on mollusks. Plastic fibers in the wipes “break up into microplastics in the environment,” Baechler says, “with devastating consequences on marine life. Microfibers are the most common type of microplastics found inside fish and shellfish worldwide, which is concerning given that studies have shown they cause decreased feeding, slowed growth, and even reproductive harm to these animals.”

Are Biodegradable Flushable Wipes Safer?

The short answer is no.

We may see the word “biodegradable” on a package of flushable wipes and think: Perfect—these will degrade completely, similar to toilet paper. However, one study found that more than 50 percent of biodegradable and flushable wipes contained both biodegradable cellulose and low-degradable synthetic fibers. The study concluded that most biodegradable flushable wipes do not really degrade.

“They may be biodegradable at some given time in a compost pile, but in the time they’re in the sewer system, that’s really not going to break down and that’s what really causes us the biggest headache out of anything,” Carter says. According to Carter, the length of time wipes remain in the sewer depends on the system itself. “Some sewer shed runs may only be a few hundred yards to the wastewater treatment facility,” Carter says. “Others can be many miles. I have lines that travel over 10 miles to get to the plant. Some utilities across the country are many miles multiple of that.”

When CR’s José Amézquita tested 11 brands of flushable wipes and four nonflushable wipes in our lab, he found that none of the "flushable" wipes caused a blockage on the toilet when tested with an intermediate load or in the drain pipe when a single wipe was flushed without a load (one wipe not labeled flushable clogged the toilet). However, experts are urging us to think beyond our toilets to the pipes and water treatment plants we can’t see, as this is where flushable wipes can become genuinely problematic.

Sometimes, the costly problem lands right on your lap.

What Are the Economic Consequences of Flushing Wipes?

Whether you use a septic system or are connected to a public sewer, prepare to open your wallet wide to address issues that can occur when we flush wipes.

More than one in five households in the U.S. depend on individual septic (decentralized) systems or small community cluster systems to treat their wastewater. If you flush wipes down the toilet and into a septic tank, they enter their own leach fields and private systems. “Then they start plugging up the leaching systems, and next thing you know, they get overflows out of these private sewer systems that are leaching in the ground and the waterways—it’s more than just the public sewer that’s affected,” Carter says. “And if you have your own private leach system, that cost to you to dig that up and replace it could be $15,000 to $20,000. For a typical family, that’s a lot of darn money.”

Plumbing costs can range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars when dealing with flushable wipe backups, says master plumber Dave Yates, owner of Yates PHCP-PVF and HVAC Consulting. This price will depend on whether you need service on weekends, holidays, and after normal business hours, and whether a firm offers flat-rate pricing. Yates says clogging your pipes with wipes can open up a real can of worms. “It is not uncommon for wipes to bring to light compound problems,” Yates says. “Tree roots will snag flushable products as will broken/separated/cracked piping, and bellies lying partially or completely full will offer a safe haven for things, like wipes, to gather together and pile up.”

Repairing a public sewer line isn’t chump change, either. According to NYC Environmental Protection, repairing a sewer line in New York City can cost between $10,000 and $15,000. According to the NACWA, the highest levels of wastewater collection occur in California, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida. States with the highest utility costs stemming from flushed wipes tend to be located along the coasts or in heavily populated industrial areas in the Midwest.

On a national level, Steve Dye, senior director of government affairs at WEF, says every utility—small, medium, and large—bears a substantial cost due to wipes going through their system. Larger utilities can bear those costs a little more, he says, because they have the capacity and taxpayer base, while people using small utilities may struggle when that utility has to raise rates to meet their compliance obligations under the Clean Water Act. “The lower-income taxpayers, individuals in cities, big cities, and small little towns, are really, really struggling with those rate increases,” Dye says.

Future cost predictions for clean water infrastructure needs (including the damage caused by flushable wipes) look grim, too. According to the 2022 Clean Watersheds Needs Survey, which the Environmental Protection Agency releases every two years, the EPA estimated that utilities would need $630 billion over the next 20 years to meet the Clean Water Act water quality goals, not taking into account future regulations to address substances such as PFAS, according to Dye. This cost is not just to address issues with wipes but includes wastewater treatment, conveyance system repair, stormwater management, and more.

What Do Plumbers Think About Flushable Wipes?

Flushable wipes are great for plumbers—because they keep their phones ringing and the clog complaints piling up.

Yates, who has been in the professional plumbing, heating, cooling, and piping trade since 1972, tells CR wipes made a lasting impression when his clients began flushing them. “One of the first clogged sewer lines we cleared saw our cables and auger”—the drain snake—“blanketed in wipes with an incredibly tough balled-up bunch in the auger,” Yates says. He has had clients insist that the wipes are flushable and safe based on the labels on their packaging. “From my perspective, that flushable term is a dodge and can be claimed because the products can be flushed down and through a toilet,” Yates says. “Unfortunately, where wipes are concerned, wipes do attract and collect.”

Yates says he understands why people are “devout users of wipes” because they clean well, but that one client told him you can’t toss wipes in the waste basket because guests might see them. “For starters, I replied, I would never keep wipes in a bathroom guests will be using because if you think you’re embarrassed to have guests see used wipes, you can bet the farm they’re never going to leave used wipes where you can see them,” Yates says. “One thousand percent guarantee they’re going to flush." A better option, he says, "albeit more expensive up-front cost-wise, is installing a bidet toilet seat or a bidet.”

Yates says it’s rare to have forewarning that your sewer is about to be clogged, but the biggest "tell" is a toilet bubbling when other fixtures or another toilet is flushed, as air is displaced by the rising tide. Yates says sluggish drains can also be a precursor to a main line clog. “More often than not, a homeowner discovers their sewer is clogged when drains at a low point in the system—floor drains, laundry standpipe, sinks, and toilets—overflow,” Yates says.

According to Yates, the work of clearing wipes out of your pipes involves heavy equipment and sometimes as many as two mechanics. The typical progression of work Yates says they have to do includes:

1. Arriving on site and assessing the scope of work. Sewer lines can be short or very long runs and all of the equipment has distance limitations. Plumbing codes dictate the maximum distance permitted between cleanouts, which can be challenging to find if plastic piping was installed without brass cleanout plugs that a metal detector can locate.

2. Determining whether they’ll use a camera first and whether to use an auger or a hydro jetter to clear the line.

3. Opening and clearing the line.

4. Performing a video inspection to verify the line is clear and free of obstructions. This is when the plumber can clearly show the homeowner the final results and reveal any defects that need to be resolved.

5. Cleaning up (an often-missed step). No one wants to deal with the residual mess left behind after a backup and the work performed to fix it, Yates says, and adds that pathogens contained in raw sewage present a health hazard for both the plumber and consumer.

Can Legislation Help?

After the 2017 revelation that wet wipes and fatbergs were damaging London’s waters, Water UK (representing all of the United Kingdom’s water and wastewater companies) partnered with Water Research Centre (WRC) and created the Fine to Flush standard in 2019. Under this standard, all wet wipes had to be lab-tested. Those that contained no plastic and could degrade in sewers the way toilet paper can received accreditation and could label their packing “Fine to Flush.” The Fine to Flush certificate ended in March 2024, and Water UK’s latest initiative is Bin the Wipe, which urges people to throw all wipes in the trash, not down the toilet.

Here in the U.S., there have only been voluntary standards for flushable products including wipes, established by the International Water Services Flushability Group. In June 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Wastewater Infrastructure Pollution Prevention and Environmental Safety (WIPPES) Act (H.R. 2964), which would create national standards for Do Not Flush labeling for nonflushable wipes. It has not yet been adopted.

According to the trade magazine Nonwovens Industry, "Currently, about 90% of wipes sold in the U.S. are non-flushable, meaning that proper labeling is exceptionally important to keep them out of toilets." The magazine also says stakeholders on both sides of the issue have reached out in support of the WIPPES legislation, and seven U.S. states have already passed labeling legislation similar to the WIPPES Act. Those states are California, Michigan, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Colorado, and New Jersey.

“Passing a national standard for flushability and biodegradability is a good first step, but we’d like to see an increase in usage of biodegradable wipes that are better for the environment, and likely, human health,” says Sara Enright, senior director of Safety and Sustainability at CR.

One Hospital’s Smart Solution

For years, John Raisch, director of facility management at Moffitt Cancer Center, encountered the dangerous and costly consequences of patients and visitors flushing wipes down the cancer care and research institution’s toilets. Sewage backups from flushed wipes would cause sewer water to come up through floor drains and other devices. In some instances, backups impacted imaging equipment and patient care areas. “Just imagine you’re unable to use this equipment,” Raisch says. “So you have to plan and reschedule and do a bunch of stuff that impacts patient care.” He and his team would have to remove drywall and, in some cases, flooring to get rid of dirty water.

Moffitt is a cancer hospital, and its patients are immunocompromised, which intensifies the need to get backups under control. “To have contaminated drywall or flooring or other things in their rooms can cause greater infection rates and detrimental care for our patients,” Raisch says. Raisch knew something had to be done, and the smart solution also turned out to be a simple one.

In 2024, Raisch had Traptex plumbing protection installed in the facility’s toilets. The installation took less than five minutes, and now, if anyone flushes a wipe, barbs on the Traptex toilet guard catch the wipe before it gets flushed.

“It has made a huge, significant difference in the number of sewage backups that we’ve had,” Raisch says. “It hasn’t reduced it altogether, but we used to have maybe one or two or three a week. Now we maybe have one or two a month. We have saved significant money as far as repairs and remediation since we put these in.”