These are something I have not had to think about for a lot of years, but the numbers are compelling. According to our friends at Earth911, there are about 3.3 million tons of disposable diapers tossed into U.S. landfills each year.

Can there possibly be a better way? The answer is yes — possibly.

The first question is whether to simply go back to cloth diapers and reuse the things. The biggest argument against that is the use of the water to clean them, but that doesn’t hold up when the environmental impacts of the disposables are considered.

Although some of the more eco-friendly versions of disposable diapers are made with plants like wheat or corn, they are generally made from wood pulp and synthetic materials, with an inner core of wood pulp and sodium polyacrylate. It is noted that there is a lot of water usage, as well as some additional not-so-friendly waste, in the manufacture of the wood pulp alone. Some are then bleached, and many use products that are imported, with no way to accurately measure the transportation impacts. Nearly all 3.3 million tons of them then get transported to the landfill, where they sit around helping to generate methane gas for another 500 years or so. Add in disposable wipes, eco-ugly packaging, plastic disposal bags, and the dollar cost of buying the estimated 7,300 disposable diapers you will need in the first 2.5 years of a child’s life, and the picture starts to look genuinely bad.

Modern cloth diapers are usually made with a plastic waterproof shell and an absorbent insert of natural or synthetic fibers. They usually use cotton, hemp, or bamboo, with plastic or Velcro closures. Cloth diapers also generally use much more friendly packaging, often paper with high recycled content. Also, consider that you only buy the cloth ones once, they can be reused for two or three generations of babies, and, when that’s done, there are a multitude of great uses for them around the house. A few of ours are still in use as cleaning cloths more than 40 years later.

With all of that, it turns out the water to clean the cloth diapers is a relatively minor environment impact, next to the impact of having disposable diapers landfilled. It’s also true that there are a few plastic-free options in cloth diapers that are even more environmentally friendly but tend to be costly. Either way, cloth is a more environmentally friendly option.

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So, say we’ve had the discussion of cloth vs. disposable, and we don’t like the cloth option. How about composting the used diapers?

If you’re done choking on your tea, the answer is that it cannot be done in the backyard. You will not generate enough heat that way to do the job, or to kill little things like e-coli. You will also displease your neighbors. Diapers of any sort are also not acceptable to the services that do curbside organics pickup in our area. There is, however, a way.

An outfit called “Redyper” now offers (believe it or not) mail-back diaper composting. They also do drop-off or curbside pickup, but only in small areas, and not around here. For a monthly fee, they supply the diapers, the compostable bags in which to put the dirty ones, and the box in which to ship them back. An algorithm is used to send you the right amount every month, and you just download a UPS label when you’re ready to ship a box back. At first glance, it looks expensive, but consider that it includes the diapers themselves and that the company buys carbon credits to offset the environmental impacts of all the shipping, and, while still probably a little more costly in dollars, the overall cost is not as bad as you first thought.

As usual, “your mileage may vary,” but it’s an intriguing notion to consider. The company does seem to get great marks for customer service and doing what they claim to do. The end product of their composting system is used for specialized applications like non-food roadside vegetation, to add to its environmental value.

The Recycle Bin is a weekly column on what to recycle, what not to recycle, and why, in Brunswick. The public is encouraged to submit questions by email to brunsrecycleinfo@gmail.com. Harry Hopcroft is a member of the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee.  This column is a product of his own research.  

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