I’m as worried as the next guy about clogged sewer pipes.

Which apparently is not nearly worried enough.

Not according to Sen. Jeff Merkley, anyway.

Lest you be laboring under the mistaken belief that there exists a topic which is either too inane or too distasteful for lawmakers to stick their noses into, figuratively speaking, I submit, as evidence of your error, the WIPPES Act.

(This is equally compelling proof that there also is no topic for which legislators will not stoop, so to speak, to mangling our language to contrive a snappy acronym to insert at the top of a bill.)

It’s not that I dismiss sewer blockages as irrelevant.

They can be quite troublesome.

Especially if you’re on the upstream side when the flow is interrupted and a formerly smooth stream becomes an unpleasant and fetid pond.

Or worse, a fountain.

But I had also thought of clogs as a strictly local matter, best handled by the city or utility district or other agency responsible for such necessary, but not especially complicated, systems.

It did not occur to me that, like Russian invasions and Supreme Court confirmations, this issue might fall under congressional purview.

But then I received an email from Merkley’s office that set me straight.

Merkley, Oregon’s junior senator, is joining with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine to sponsor the Wastewater Infrastructure Pollution Prevention and Environmental Safety Act.

Like most legislation, this sounds pretty vital — at least if you ignore that sophomoric, and slightly scatological, acronym.

But the pollution in this case isn’t a carcinogenic compound that can also cause you to sprout new appendages even if you manage to avoid cancer.

It’s wet wipes.

You know the kind I mean — nicely moistened (pre-moistened, that is) tissues that you might employ when plain old toilet paper isn’t quite up to the task.

These products are particularly popular with parents whose children are in diapers, the moisture making for a smoother glide and, as with a new squeegee on a windshield, a more thorough cleaning.

The problem, as Merkley’s emailed press release explains in considerable detail, is that these wipes frequently are flushed even though the types made of plastic or other synthetic fibers aren’t intended to be treated like toilet paper.

It happens that I’ve had a few conversations over the years about this topic — the flushability factor, I suppose you could call it — with officials from the Baker City Public Works Department.

(Nothing enlivens an ordinary day quite like a discussion about the myriad items that make the journey from the toilet bowl to the sewer system. This is a longer list than you might expect it to be.)

Michelle Owen, the city’s public works director, told me in 2020 that wipes — some of which are branded as “flushable” — have made up significant chunks of clogs that have blocked sewer pipes in town.

Although she also said that wipes are more likely to plug the smaller-diameter pipes that connect homes to the city’s sewer mains — and those smaller pipes are the homeowner’s responsibility, not the city’s.

Merkley and Collins aren’t pioneers in the legislative campaign to combat the threat posed by disposable wipes.

On June 8, 2021, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown signed into law House Bill 2344. It made Oregon the second state — Washington is the true innovator, with a law passed in 2020 — to require packages of wipes to include a “do not flush” label.

This seems to me reasonable, even though I generally disdain the creation of new laws that deal with issues which hardly constitute an existential threat to the public.

I wonder, though, whether a public awareness campaign — you can imagine the possibilities with billboards, although you might not want to — wouldn’t be at least as effective as a labeling law.

And probably more effective. Food packages are already festooned with federally mandated labels showing the egregious tallies of calories, after all, yet those blatant reminders haven’t made a dent in our nation’s collective corpulence.

(Of course it’s also possible to grab a handful of chips with your eyes closed, so as to avoid seeing those shameful measurements of saturated fat and milligrams of salt.)

Merkley and Collins’ bill includes both labeling and publicity — the latter including $5 million in grants “to support and expand education and outreach activities” with the basic message, as I understand it, of telling people to quit flushing wipes.

(Not that federal officials could ever be satisfied with such straightforward advice.)

I’m not so sanguine, though, about Congress mucking around in this matter after reading, again from Merkley’s press release, about what the bill calls for.

Specifically, the legislation “directs the Federal Trade Commission, in consultation with the Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations on “Do Not Flush” labeling requirements.”

I can scarcely conceive of the piles of paperwork, and the terabytes of data, that will be generated when two massive federal agencies get together to hash out anything. I daresay the environmental effects from the paper alone would offset any benefits to be derived from keeping wet wipes out of our nation’s sewer pipes.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.