You know you’ve lost your inner child if you don’t laugh at the word “poop.”
Friends of mine just had their first child. A beautiful, tiny piece of art whose life consists of sleep, eat, poop and cry.
Dad spends a lot of time discussing her poop. The first (looked like tar but didn’t smell), most recent (“You missed it, she pooped!”), the frequency and quality (“You know, it’s all going to change again when she gets real food.”). He is a proud Papa and a numbers junkie. He keeps stats and details, on everything. When Mom and Dad noted he had only recently stopped recording time and duration of meals, poop and sleep, I suspected Mom’s gentle touch brought that change.
[Sidenote: Assuming they'll read this, I enjoyed the conversation and was impressed with the obvious joy and relaxed atmosphere in this baby-centered household. Really, even the poop conversations were entertaining and an obvious show of love.]
When Dad talked about baby diapers he described the challenges facing environmentally aware parents. They don’t want to leave their daughter a world filled with disposables piling up in landfills, put her delicate baby bottom next to possibly harmful materials or use materials that will scratch her. They estimate an average use of 10 diapers a day and, their baby will go through 6,000 diapers before she’s potty trained.
Whether they head to a landfill or a washing machine, that’s a lot diapers every day. Multiply that by the 11,000 babies a day in the United States or the 360,000 babies a day worldwide. Last century the Environmental Protection Agency estimated 3.4 Million tons of diapers hit the landfills – they have not yet updated their study.
This poses a huge challenge for parents hoping to pass on a better planet to their children. Cloth diapers hit the environment with impacts to water and electricity. Disposables through landfills and manufacture.
If your community is moving towards “purple pipes,” as mine is, you may have the opportunity to use non-potable water to wash cloth diapers and can limit your impact to biodegradable laundry detergent. You could also go old school and collect rain water or gray water.
If you’re concerned about our already over-leveraged landfills, tossing those diapers creates a problem. Whole Foods offers the flushable gDiaper, the reviews (and reviews and reviews) are mixed and the product expensive. Like many interesting products in their early days, they have some details to work out and to be really effective the cost needs to be manageable for families.
Fuzzy Bunz offers a cloth diaper that touts dry, rash free baby buns. For many parents the sight of rubber pails filled with dirty diapers is more than they can deal with, in step the neighborhood diaper service. Diaper services use less water than you would at home but might not offset the cost of cheap disposables. But, do you really want that precious package in a cheap disposable?
San José’s Green Vision includes 100% waste diversion from landfills and conversion of waste to energy. Wonder they’re including baby poo.
On top of the obvious problems with disposables they use Sodium Polyacrylate, a superabsorbent polymer (SAP), to convert fluids to a gel. In the past, Sodium Polyacrylate was used in Tampons and may have been linked to Toxic Shock Syndrome. Times have changed and the standards for ”super absorbency,” as defined in the 1980′s, have dropped significantly along with worries about Toxic Shock.
The next bit sounds like it was taken from 30 Rock. Studies are being done on retrieving and recycling parts of these disposables – including reuse of the absorbent part. (Brief sidebar: ick)
Maybe the decision isn’t so hard after all, maybe the difficulty lies in doing it. It is a lot easier to pick up a cheap, disposable diaper and throw it away than put a smelly, poop filled diaper in a bag for washing.
