Become a Fatberg Fighter with our online game!

Are you all about protecting the environment? Do you want to do your bit to keep the UK’s waterways free from nasty, mucky blockages that damage your drains and foul up our rivers and seas? If so, then it’s time for you to become a Fatberg Fighter with our new online browser game!

Getting clued up about the threat of fatbergs is very important if you’re serious about keeping your community clean and green – and there’s no better way of getting involved than playing our Fatberg Fighters game. This fun arcade experience will test your gaming skills and reflexes, while also teaching you a thing or two about how we can fight fatbergs in real life.

Play our Fatberg Fighters game below, through your browser! If you want to know more about how the game works and how to become a Fatberg Fighter for real, then read on…

How to play Fatberg Fighters!

In our Fatberg Fighters game, you take control of one of our intrepid Lanes for Drains drainage engineers, using your mouse cursor or your finger to move your character up and down. Simply click your mouse or tap the screen to spray a water droplet into the fatberg blocks in the centre of the screen!

Each of the blocks features an icon representing one of the different items that can build up in the drains to form a fatberg, including fats, oils, grease, wet wipes, bandages, plasters, and cotton buds. By bouncing your water drop back and forth, you will gradually chip away at the fatberg blocks, and the level will be complete when they’re all gone.

Be careful, though – if you lose your water drop off the side of the screen before destroying the fatberg, it’ll be game over for you!

What are fatbergs?

If you haven’t heard of them before, you might be wondering – just what is a fatberg? Most people have never seen one, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still pose a serious threat to our sewers and seas.

As the name suggests, a fatberg is a huge lump of fat, oil, grease and other common household items that accumulates in the drain or sewer due to people at home tipping the wrong things into their kitchen or bathroom sinks and toilets. The following items can all become part of a fatberg when everything gets clumped together:

  • Cooking oil – pre or post-cooking
  • Margarine
  • Butter
  • Lard
  • Cooking sauces and condiments
  • Food – even crumbs!
  • Anything containing plastic, including:
    • Wet wipes
    • Face masks
    • Nappies
    • Cotton buds
    • Contact lenses
    • Bandages and plasters
    • Dental floss

Sewer water needs to flow freely so it can reach the processing plant and get turned back into fresh, clean water, but when a fatberg is blocking the pipes, that isn’t possible!

Fatbergs start off small, but they grow over time as more and more fat and waste gets tipped down the drain. Eventually, they get so big that they can block up even the largest sewer tunnel – here at Lanes, we’ve dealt with fatbergs that are the same size as a double-decker bus!

Why are fatbergs so dangerous?

As you might imagine, fatbergs are seriously disgusting things – but they can also be seriously dangerous. With a fatberg blocking up your pipes, your drains and sewers won’t work properly, and it can lead to sewage and nasty smells overflowing into our streets and homes. Ugh!

Unfortunately, that’s only one of many problems that fatbergs can cause. We rely on our sewers and underground pipes to keep wastewater flowing to the right places, so if they become blocked, it means that the streets will become flooded if it rains too heavily, as the water won’t have anywhere to go.

Even worse, sometimes that dirty water and raw sewage will start flowing out into nature, leading to polluted streams and rivers, and nasty plastic waste entering the ocean and posing a threat to aquatic wildlife. So fatbergs aren’t just an inconvenience to humans – they’re a danger to the environment in general.

Once a fatberg has built up, it’s very difficult to get rid of it. You might think a fatberg would be soft, but over time they actually dry out and become as hard as concrete, meaning there’s no way of getting rid of them other than manually digging them out with heavy equipment and high-pressure water jets. This can take a long time, and might require us to dig up the entire road, meaning road closures and traffic jams until the work is complete.

How can I help to fight the fatbergs?

So now you understand the danger that fatbergs pose, and you’ve got a high score on our Fatberg Fighters game that you can show off to your friends. But do you want to know how you can become a real-life Fatberg Fighter, and help us prevent fatbergs from forming?

It’s so easy – all you need to do to fight fatbergs is take a few simple steps. You won’t have to go down a sewer to get rid of the fatberg menace!

  • Make sure you never pour fat, oil and grease down the sink plughole when you’re washing up! These materials should be collected in a container, left to dry out and then put safely in the bin.
  • Clear all of the food from your plates into the bin, rather than emptying it down the sink. Even small crumbs can help fatbergs to grow!
  • Never flush wet wipes, plasters, cotton buds or any other plastic-containing items down your toilet, even if the packaging tells you it’s “flushable”. When using the toilet, remember the 3 Ps – only pee, poo and (toilet) paper can be safely flushed
  • Persuade your family and friends to follow these rules as well! By getting the entire community involved, fighting fatbergs will be much easier!

You might think that none of this sounds very big or difficult – but that’s the real beauty of being a true Fatberg Fighter. Fatbergs are much, much easier to prevent than they are to get rid of when they’re already here, so even these little actions can make a BIG difference to our sewers, our seas and our society!

Want to learn more?

If you want to find out more about fatbergs, and how to get involved in preventing them, then you should check out the following links:

Want to go a step further in keeping our sewers and seas safe from fatbergs and plastic pollution? Then get involved in Unblocktober, our yearly awareness campaign, which challenges families to go a whole month without tipping any damaging substances down their drains every October.

You can find out how to get your family or school involved in Unblocktober at www.unblocktober.org. There’s no better way of turning your virtual battle against fatbergs into real-life action, and become a true environmental hero!