The idea is to have it out of sight and out of mind, but when something is flushed down that ceramic black hole it doesn’t just evaporate – it ends up at one of Wannon Water’s reclamation plants.

The region’s sewage service has collected various foreign objects over the years including mobile phones, false teeth, glasses, dummies and golf balls. 

The plant has received several requests from people who accidentally dropped important objects into the toilet, including a wedding ring and four $50 notes. 

But finding objects is an impossible task, with millions of litres of sewage entering the plants each day. 

Foreign waste is regularly removed from screens in Portland, Hamilton, Port Fairy and Warrnambool, but when the waste can’t readily break down, it can block the machines.

Wanon Water general manager service delivery Ian Bail said a large amount of the foreign material causing trouble for the plant was “so-called” flush-able toilet wipes. 

He said unlike toilet paper the wipes don’t disintegrate, meaning when they are flushed down the toilet they end up in the sewage plant, often bound together.

“Although labelled as flush-able, the wipes get to the plant and they end up in one of our machines, which are only supposed to treat small material,” he said. 

“Once flushed the wipes get caught up, they bind together and they ultimately become this big mass of material that can damage the machine, causing it to break down more often.”

When the wipes hit the machine, the conveyors and augers, which aid in the removal of coarse solids from the sewage, can also be blocked, requiring one or two operators to clean out the mess. 

This can take between one and four hours depending on the entanglement. 

Mr Bail said the machine used to be cleaned on a monthly basis, but the introduction of flush-able wipes meant the machine needed to be cleaned twice a week.

“We can sometimes end up with something like 70 kilograms worth of flush-able wipes that are all bound up into a horrible immovable mass,” he said. 

“We’ve then got to drag it out by hand when it’s wet and it’s been there for a few days.

“People say ‘it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it’, but in this case they don’t. We agree that it’s a dirty job but we would really prefer that someone didn’t have to do it. 

“The work costs us time and money and effort, which ultimately gets passed back to our customers at the end.” 

Foreign materials that make their way into the plant can also affect the use of bio-solids, which are produced from the stablisied sludge at the large sewage plant as well as at smaller facilities in Camperdown, Cobden, Heywood and Terang.

The bio-solids are dried and stablisied for several years before the nutrient-rich material is applied on local farms.

Any contamination of the sludge can create environmental problems and impact the use-able nature of the bio-solids.

Watch as Mr Bail takes us through Warrnambool’s reclamation plant: