Infrastructure Stewardship: A Glove Story

My name is COVID Glove (CG for short), and I want to tell you my life story. My pals and I have been seeing a lot more action lately as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re being used not only by essential workers at hospitals and grocery stores, but by regular folks, too. I was chosen on a fine Monday morning for a grocery store run..

I was pulled out of bed (the box where my unused pals and I hang out before our adventures begin) and pulled over the right hand of a human as she left the house. I did a superb job protecting her as she touched the steering wheel in her car, the door to the grocery store, all the vegetables and packages, and the self-checkout buttons. My human then took her groceries to her car, drove home, and brought the groceries in. Here’s where things went wrong.

Instead of throwing me into the trash (I know, I have a short lifespan. I’ve accepted it, so let’s not dwell on that right now, okay?), she decided to flush me down the toilet. WHAT? My glove pals and I are NOT toilet people. So imagine my surprise when I took the waterslide of toilet water into a small pipe, landed in a bigger pipe, and ended up with a bunch of used toilet paper at a big treatment plant.

The first stop was this big screen. Some of my glove pals were trapped there along with those wipes that claim to be flushable (we all know they’re not) and other big chunks of stuff. I didn’t want to get trapped with my pals, so I shrunk up really small and snuck through the gap.

The next step in my adventure was this big chamber. Since I’m a glove and don’t have lungs, I went under water and took a quick peek. There were just rocks and sand at the bottom of this spot, so I floated back up to the top. I went into another, similar chamber that had other sediment at the bottom. Again, I stayed floating up top. I’m not heavy enough to sink down to the bottom, so I was able to sneak through again.

Oof. I hate this next part. When I got to the end of the second chamber, the water started moving A LOT faster. I’m thinking at this point that I should’ve tried to swim to the bottom of one of the chambers. Instead, I realized I was heading toward a pump, and I was being sucked into it. There were a few of us getting funneled together – a couple of other glove pals, some other plastic pieces, and those stupid wipes. We decided that instead of getting sucked into the unknown, we’d band together. We DID get sucked into this thing, BUT we were able to stretch out and form a clog. The pump wasn’t strong enough to pull us through! The pump stopped, and the vortex stopped. We sat there for a while like this, and some lights and warning bells flashed. Eventually another human came over, and she pulled us out of the pump suction. Finally saved! We definitely ruined that pump, though.

I heard the humans talking as our savior took apart the pump and put us and other debris into the trash can, saying that this would likely cost a lot of money for the water and sewer customers. They were also worried because the longer that nasty pump was down, the longer they had to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scary stuff – I wish my original human would have just thrown me into a waste bin in the first place.

I eventually ended up in that trash where I belonged, and I definitely learned a little about the wastewater process. While in the trash, I chatted a bit more with the wipes (still hate them), and they let me know that they end up here a lot more than my glove pals. Next time you think about ditching a “flushable” wipe, a household disinfecting wipe, ol’ CG, or another one of my buddies, just make sure you just put us in the trash. That’s where we belong.