1,200 tons of sanitary wipes are collected per year in the treatment plants that serve Alicante and the maintenance cost required to unclog the sanitation network is estimated at one million euros per year. They are 90% of the total solid waste that is removed.
Despite this, when there is an episode of intense rain, hundreds of them are washed into the sea and, as happened recently in the area of Cabo Huertas and in El Campello, bathers find themselves with an unpleasant accumulation of this product from which Users continue to flush toilets down the wrong route.
For this reason, Aguas de Alicante and the city council have decided to launch an awareness campaign in which they have involved property managers. They presented it yesterday on Albufereta Beach. “Make wipes stop being news” is the message and this was conveyed by Sergio Sánchez Ríos, general director of Aguas de Alicante; Manuel Villar, vice mayor and councilor for the Environment, and María del Mar Rodríguez, president of the College of Property Administrators of Alicante.
Sánchez Ríos explained that “although we carry out awareness-raising actions on this matter regularly, on this occasion, the campaign is activated due to the recent appearance of solid waste on our beaches after episodes of rain in the city. The treatment plants do their job in relation to this management in dry weather without problem; “They are collected and treated, of course, at high cost.”
However, Sánchez Ríos added, "when the rains arrive and depending on their intensity, it is possible that they surpass the protection barriers that we put in place and the undesirable effects that we have contemplated on our coastline appear. Therefore, the best measure is citizen awareness and collaboration in something that affects us all, environmentally and economically.”
Focused on the prevention of misuse of the toilet by citizens, especially the problems arising from the throwing away of wet wipes, “Make wipes stop being in the news” is part of the periodic campaigns that Aguas de Alicante carries out. in relation to the good use of sanitation, always emphasizing two axes.
On the one hand, an environmental message and the prevention of a problem generated in homes, but which ends up affecting the city's sanitation with periodic traffic jams, inconvenience to citizens and the arrival of waste into the natural environment in rainy episodes.
In the city of Alicante, nearly 1,250 tons of wipes were extracted in the city's pumps and treatment plants during 2023, waste that represents 90% of all solids that are intercepted in wastewater. Along with this, the cost of the environmental impact due to its presence in the sea due to relief from rain and pipe breaks, where its removal may be impossible, is not calculable.
On the other hand, a message of an economic nature and its important impact on the city in this sense, derived from the costly repairs to the sanitation system that they cause. The cost of managing this waste, simply for its extraction and final destination, is more than €75 per ton; If we add to this the impact of additional cleaning of pipes and conduits, unclogging, breakdowns, obstructions and spills into the environment due to their presence, the figure rises to 5-6 euros per inhabitant per year, generating an expense of more than 1 million euros annually.
Focusing on the big headlines generated in the different media after the aforementioned episode of rain, this communication action aimed at raising awareness emphasizes citizen collaboration to “eliminate the wipes from the headlines” of the local media, thanks to the correct use of the toilet; to ensure that the wipes do not occupy the information space.
Starting from two initial graphics in that line and with the city's beaches in their best state as an image, the campaign proposes adaptations for multiple dissemination channels, so that the message is capillarized to the greatest extent possible. Among others, with the collaboration of the Alicante City Council, through the Department of Traffic, which will include the campaign for its dissemination during the month of May in more than twenty street furniture stands managed throughout the city.
