nuts4chic - lifestyle
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by Roxanne Kennett Revolting rubbish – We all know that disposable nappies are bad for the environment but is there really a greener alternative?
There are lots of scary statistics about how bad disposable nappies are for the environment. For example, nearly three billion nappies are thrown away each year in the UK alone. Of these three billion, 90% end up in landfill sites. With this waste being equivalent in weight to 70,000 double-decker buses, which when lined end to end would stretch from London to Edinburgh, it’s easy to see why landfill space is running out. Particularly as disposable nappies are believed to take hundreds of years to decompose. This is obviously a problem and many local authorities are now encouraging parents to use washable cloth nappies as a greener alternative. Some even run or subsidise nappy laundering services, which pick up your soiled nappies to do all the dirty work for you. Cloth nappies have definitely moved on from the days of soaking terry nappies in buckets. They’re now generally much easier to use, with no need for fiddly pins or plastic pants. They’re soft, adjustable and come in endless colours and designs. Fantastic! So how come the vast majority of parents still favour disposables? I asked around every parent I knew –and I go to a lot of toddler groups, having two restless boys!– and not one single Mum or Dad used reusable cloth nappies on their babies. Among the reasons given were that parents didn’t know where they could buy the nappies or were unsure how to use them.
Another common reason was that disposable are simply more convenient, and who wants to give themselves more washing to do? Especially washing of that nature. However, advocates of cloth nappies feel that extra loads of washing are a small price to pay for the environmental benefit. But are cloth nappies really better for the environment? Not according to an independent study commissioned by the Environment Agency, the leading public body for protecting and improving the environment in England and Wales. This study shows that both types of nappies are detrimental to the environment in their own way and that the additional electricity used to wash cloth nappies is just as bad for the environment as the pollution caused by disposables. Therefore, neither type of nappy is better or worse. So it seems that, while users of cloth nappies may think they are taking the greener option, they may still be doing as much damage to the environment, just in a different way. Unfortunately it seems that there is no ‘green’ option when it comes to nappies and parents only have two evils to choose from. Which one is the lesser of the two evils truly is a matter of opinion.
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