A Play on Words !

Sydney Water has just lost another round of its court battle with Kleenex over whether it engaged in deceptive advertising when it claimed that its " wet wipes " were flushable.  Kleenex is a subsidiary of the giant American Kimberley Clark company and many years ago its product designers came up with an innovative new product.

They thought there was demand for a moistened wash cloth for cleaning baby bottoms after a nappy change.  A damp cloth would be kinder to a baby's delicater skin that wiping clean with toilet paper and changing baby often occurred in a location where water was not available.  The sales volume of this new product proved the designers were correct and the product was labelled " flushable ".

Then a strange thing happened.  Adults took a liking to these wet wipes and started using them as personable toilet paper and the mass making its way through the sewerage system began to exhibit a new problem for the water authorities.  These wet wipes did not dissolve as readily as toilet paper and we quickly began to encounter sewerage blockages.

What were termed  " fatbergs " formed and the only way to clear them away was to dig up the sewer and mechanically remove the conglomerate of paper, fats, grease, hair and other waste and truck it away to a landfill.   This was a huge expense and Sydney Water began advertising to stop people putting wet wipes down the toilet.

Its initial court case over that " flushable " instruction failed.  Last June the Federral court found that the consumer watchdog had failed to prove that the Cottonelle product  - rather than wipes generally -  caused actual harm to sewerage systems.    This product has been discontinued, but is replaced with new products which still bear that flushable label.

Now a full bench of the Federal Court has upheld a decision that Kleenex had not engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct by claiming four types of Cottonelle " flushabl;e "cloths were fit for flushing.   The court said the watchdog had argued in the  original case that the products caused " actual harm " in sewerage systems, rather than posing a risk, and it could not change course during the appeal.

So we have massive blockages still occurring in the sewer system and the public show no signs of discontinuing their habit of replacing toilet paper with wet wipes.   Either Sydney Water needs to redesign the sewerage flow to accomodate wet wipes or Kleenex needs to discover a formulae that allows this product to disintegrate without harm to the sewer system.

And next time around the legal minds that word court challenges need to take more care in how they describe the occurrence they wish to discontinue.  That interpretation of the lexicon is something the court system takes very seriousl;y  !