There’s no flushing away this problem.
A Brooklyn dentist says the moistened wipes he used in the bathroom clogged his pipes — and he’s making a federal case out of it.
Sales of wipes have soared to $6 billion a year, with advertisers claiming the products are the best way to get clean — and safe to toss in the toilet.
But the messy truth, say consumers like Dr. Joseph Kurtz of Flatbush, who is suing the makers of Cottonelle and Costco-brand wipes in Brooklyn federal court, is that “flushable” wipes aren’t really flushable.
“They do not break down as manufacturers advertise,” according to the class-action suit filed by Kurtz.
The 35-year-old, who used the products in his Brooklyn and New Jersey homes last summer, was forced to spend $600 on plumbers to clear his backed-up pipes, lawyer Mark Reich said.
City Hall confirms wipes are a huge pain in the rear.
Toilet paper disintegrates almost immediately, but the strong-fiber wipes wreak havoc on city sewer systems, according to the Department of Environmental Protection.
The city spends $18 million a year to collect and discard debris caught in machinery at its 14 wastewater-treatment plants — and nearly all of it in recent years is flushable wipes, Deputy Commissioner Vincent Sapienza told The Post.
“The increase in clogs and problems we’ve been having in New York City — it seems to almost correlate directly with the increase in sales of these flushable wipes,” Sapienza said. “They make it all the way to the plant and they just wrap themselves around our equipment.”
The DEP now carts away 110,000 cubic yards of debris each month from its treatment plants — double the volume taken away just five years ago, Sapienza said.
“They’re gumming up our works,” he said. “Our guys are continually having to take pumps apart because they get clogged. We stopped being surprised, but it’s a lot of work.”
The city doesn’t know how much in overtime costs it spends on the wipe-out.
London officials are even more bummed about wipes.
They had to blast a 15-ton, bus-sized mass of wipes and congealed grease — dubbed “fatberg” — from the city’s nearly paralyzed sewer system last summer.
Sapienza noted that more wipes come from the Upper East Side north of 72nd Street in Manhattan, as well as the western side of The Bronx, than in any other spot in the city.
Kurtz, who is seeking unspecified damages, wants flushable-wipes manufacturers to change their advertising.
So does Sapienza, who wouldn’t comment on the legal claim but said the wipes should be trashed, not flushed.
A spokesman for Kimberly-Clark Corp., which makes Cottonelle, said in a statement: “Kimberly-Clark has an extensive testing process to ensure that our flushable wipes products meet or exceed all industry guidelines and we stand behind our claims of flushability.”