Melbourne engineers have invented a coating for pipes that could save our sewers from congealed masses blocking the wastewater system.
The blockages are called Fatbergs. They are made of fat, oil and grease, and clump together with wet wipes, rubbish and human excrement.
Fatbergs are responsible for almost half of sewer blockages in Australia, costing $100 million a year.
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These masses block pipes and can only be pushed through manually by workers.
Now, engineers at RMIT University have come up with a coating for the concrete pipes in our sewer networks that would target calcium, a key contributor to fatberg formation.
Early testing shows they’ve reduced fatbergs by about 30 per cent. More work needs to be done to optimise the coating before it’s rolled out.
Greg Ryan from the Water Services Association of Australia told The Guardian fatbergs can become so hard they have to be drilled out.
“They tend to stick to the walls of the pipe, and then as they stick, the other stuff accumulates, so you’ve got potentially wet wipes and other things that have been flushed down,” Ryan said.
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