I could not make this a complete cloth -v- disposable 'drama' without 'touching-on' the GREEN issues that should concern all of us.  I would be lying if I told  you that my decision was strongly influenced by any environmental issues at the time our 2nd child was born.  You could have definitely called me 'environmentally-challenged.'  I wallowed in my own reckless consumption and was FAR from looking beyond convenience to make eco-logical decisions. 

Related Articles The Diaper Drama     Scene 1 - The Costs     Scene 2 - Dryness and Rashes     Scene 3 - Health Issues     Scene 4 - Environment

Thankfully, life's decisions are dynamic and I was stumbling toward more natural choices in living and parenting.  Questions about the 'washing' of my new diapers served as a catalyst, exposing me to the world of environmentally conscious products & modes of living.

I realized that using cloth diapers, in and of itself, is an active form of recycling, because it saves resources by reducing consumption.

The environmental arguments centered around methods of diapering seem to break down into 3 different categories:

1.  The aggressive consumption of both renewable and non-renewable resources.
2.  The already overburdened landfills.
3.  Health hazards associated with human waste in landfills.

CONSUMPTION:
(Refer to 'Sources' at the end of Scene 4 for corresponding references.)

To better understand consumption's relationship with disposable diapers, you need to know WHAT EXACTLY it takes to make a disposable diaper.  Disposables are made of ". . . a waterproof polyethylene outer layer, an inner layer made from wood pulp and synthetic polyacrylate [the super-absorbent crystal mentioned above in 'Health Issues' and a water-repellent liner.  Most brands have fragrances and perfumes (8)." (brackets mine)

So, beginning with the waterproof polyethylene outer layer and water-repellent liner, let's look at their raw materials.  Oil is the raw material for the polyethylene in disposables.  We are all aware it is a 'pressed' non-renewable resource.  It takes 1 cup of crude oil to make the plastic for 1 disposable diaper (9).  Taking that a bit further, it takes 286 lbs. of plastic (including  diaper packaging) per year to supply 1 baby in disposable diapers (10).  All of those numbers seem like a gross misuse of natural resources, but it really put things into perspective when I read that " . . . 18 billion disposable diapers are used in the U.S. each year.  Enough to stretch to the moon and back 9 times (9)."  Now, if I remembered correctly from my school years, the moon is pretty far, right?

Going inside of the diaper, you'll uncover an inner layer made from wood and sodium polyacrylate.  Getting back to numbers, it takes 200-400 kg. of fluff pulp to supply 1 baby in disposables for 1 year.    On the other hand, if you go the cloth diaper route, you'll use less than 10 kg of cotton for 2 (not just 1) years worth of diapering!  That is a significant way to reduce oil consumption and cotton is a very renewable resource.  Wood pulp, in and of itself, indirectly serves as a contaminant, because it has to be bleached for that 'whiter than white' look of disposable diapers.  The bleaching is done with a chlorine gas and produces toxic chemicals such as the Dioxins discussed above.  These toxic chemicals, although by-products, make their way into the mills' emissions and into the diapers that are manufactured from that pulp (8). 

According to the CDC (Cotton Diaper Coalition), it takes massive amounts of water " . . . to process wood pulp into paper for throwaways.  Little recycled paper is used in the production of most throwaways.  The production of a disposable diaper comes at a high environmental price both in water and energy (11)."  The Landbank Consultancy, commissioned by the Women's Environmental Network in London, reprocessed Procter & Gamble's 1991 studies that falsely claimed the environmental impact of disposables was not materially worse than cloth diaper usage.  The Landbank Consultancy used Procter & Gamble's own findings in their two studies and other information researched on the impacts of processing both disposable and cloth diapers.  They concluded that disposable diapers create 2.3 times as much water waste, use 3.5 times as much energy, use 8.3 times the non-regenerable raw materials, use 90 times the renewable raw materials and 4 to 30 times as much land for growing raw materials.  The Landbank Consultancy even took into consideration that when wearing cloth diapers, there are more frequent changes - they assigned a 1/1.72 ratio to offset the difference.  Procter and Gamble did not submit a legal challenge to this report (7). 

Simply put, since disposables consume 70% more energy than the average reusable diaper per diaper change (10), is it really WISE to use 3.4 billion gallons of oil and over 250,000 trees annually to manufacture them when they already end up in our overburdened landfills (2)?"

OVERBURDENED LANDFILLS:
(Refer to 'Sources at the end of Scene 4 for corresponding references.)

The single-use life cycle of disposable diapers perpetuate their continued consumption which causes undue stresses on our natural resources and unnecessarily contributes to our landfills (12).  "Disposable diapers are the 3rd largest single consumer item in landfills, and represent 30% of non-biodegradable waste (9)."  Even though it may seem as if each child doesn't contribute significantly to those numbers, that is a false assumption. Each baby diapered in disposables contributes about 1 ton of garbage, assuming an avg. diaper use of 2 years.  I had to ask myself - 'What would I do with my ton(s) created by my children?'  Burying it in the backyard didn't seem a viable solution considering we are always 'renting' and landlords usually don't 'go' for that kind of thing. 

According to Consumer Reports, disposable diapers are easy to identify in the waste stream because families use so much of them (13).  Literally from birth, babies have disposables 'taped' to their bodies, "Free samples [of Pampers®] are sent home with about 4 million newborns each year (18)." The only other items that outnumber the amount of disposables in landfills are newspapers and beverage and food containers (14).    In 1988, a study by Carl Lehrburger concluded that ". . . disposable diapers accounted for 2% of total municipal solid waste and 3.5 to 4.5% of household waste by weight.  This report says that approximately 18 billion paper and plastic diapers were landfilled in 1988 (13)."  I have not been able to find a more current study indicating what the ramifications of the last 13 years worth of increased consumption are, but I can only imagine.  The best that I can cite is that ". . . disposables generate sixty times more solid waste than cotton (9)."

Do not be fooled into thinking you are making a GREEN choice just because your disposable diaper packaging labels the diaper as 85% biodegradable.  In an ideal situation, this might actually be true.  However, we do not lay these diapers out flat on our driveways for the sun and air to decompose them, instead we roll them up in tight little bundles of urine and feces and throw them into a sealed landfill.  These landfills have been constructed to minimize production of methane gas and other leachates . . . the two commodities (air and water) that biodegration requires are lacking (13).  It is estimated that it would take a disposable diaper 500 years to decompose in a landfill.  "Disposables are not readily biodegradable.  The paper must be exposed to air and sun to decompose.  Thirty percent of a disposable diaper is plastic and is not compostable (2)." 

Even so, there have been attempts to successfully compost or recycle disposable diapers to cut the flow into the landfills.  In 1991, an attempt towards recycling was made in the city of Seattle, but after working with 800 families, 30 day care centers, a hospital and a Seattle-based recycler for a year, the conclusion by Procter & Gamble was that it was not an economically feasible task on any scale.  Apparently, there wasn't a market for the plastic and paper recycled from these efforts (10).  And really, even if there was a market, eventually the 'end' to this product would be a landfill - it cannot be recycled to infinity.  Scott Stewart, the Procter & Gamble's public affairs manager at the time of the study, estimated that even if composting was an alternative to landfills,  the United States has as few as 20 facilities that could handle the composting of diapers.  It would be costly to develop new plants with these systems (16).  I would love to see them try to find a place to build these plants - who wants noxious chemicals contaminating their groundwater and air? 

Common sense, it seems, would tell us that anything we purchase that is disposable is less environmentally friendly than the non-disposable counterpart.

HEALTH HAZARDS OF HUMAN WASTE IN LANDFILLS:
(Refer to 'Sources' at the end of Scene 4 for corresponding references.)

Cloth diapers have a defined ecological advantage over disposables.  What is that?  When using cloth diapers, the human waste gets sent to the municipal sanitary waste system, where it is treated.  However, the EPA notes that " . . . a significant portion of the disposable diaper waste dumped in American's landfills every year is actually biodegradable human waste preserved forever (16)."  That is just disgusting.  The Egyptians buried their treasures and what do we bury?  Our 'treasures?'  What will future, more advanced (we hope) societies think when they uncover our landfills?

Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and The American Public Health Association advise parents that fecal matter and urine should not be allowed to be disposed of together in the regular trash, because it contaminates the ground water and spreads disease (11).  These are associations that are not 'linked' to any particular 'side' in this issue.  And yet, what is their 'unbiased' response??

"Disposable diaper packages contain a request printed on the outside of the package that the inner diapers be rinsed and the fecal material flushed down the toilet before the diapers are put out for curbside collection (14)."
Now, stop laughing!  Have you ever seen ANYONE RINSE OUT a disposable, much less dump out the feces into the toilet?  I sure didn't when I used them for my first child.  I wrapped them up into a little 'feces/urine bomb' and threw them in the nearest trash (preferably as far away from my house as possible).  Or better yet, twisted them up and sealed them into a Diaper-Genie® to keep the smell out of the nursery.  Then, on trash day, my ever-faithful husband held his nose while he pulled the long string of 'sausage rolled' disposable diapers out of the Diaper-Genie® and tossed them into yet another plastic bag to carry to the curb.  Now that I think of it, that made 4 different layers of plastic (2 in the diaper, one in the Diaper-Genie® and the final trash bag).  What a waste.

Thing is, the World Health Organization guidelines are being violated whenever human waste goes into the landfills.  So, technically putting diapers into the trash without cleansing them is ILLEGAL.  Right around July of 1998 there was a ruling against grass going into the landfills with the rest of our household waste.  I remember how I found out - our family's trash bags of cuttings were left at the curb when everything else had been picked up.  There were holes torn into them (to identify them, I'm guessing) and it made me angry.  Can you imagine if trash collectors started doing this with the collection of disposable diapers?  You think the dogs in your neighborhood are bad now!

 In her book, THE JOY OF CLOTH DIAPERS, Jane McConnell reported that our landfills contain 5 million tons of untreated human waste - a breeding ground for diseases that could potentially contaminate our groundwater (4).  When you toss a disposable into the dumpster you are adding to the 84 million lbs. of raw fecal matter going to the environment per year (8).  The Lehrburger report mentioned above also suggested that disposable diapers may represent a health risk at landfill sites and  recommends that state health officials determine if diapers should be classified as infectious waste because of the untreated feces and urine they contain (13).  There are an estimated 100 intestinal viruses living on the feces in landfills and  these viruses are also possible contaminates of our water supplies and could latch on to the insects that would bring these diseases back to us (17).  You only thought you threw it away!  It is just as Arnold said, "I'll Be Back!"

SOURCES FOR SCENE 4:
2.  Caldwell, Ginny, "Diapers.  Disposable or Cotton?", Eco-Baby Catalogue (www.ecobaby.com).
4.  Allison, Cathy, "Disposable Diapers: Potential Health Hazards?"
5.  Peggy's Diapers Slings 'N Things (www.peggysdiapers.com).
6.  "Why Cloth Diapers?,"( www.diapersafari.com).
7.  'The Poop on Diapers,"  (www.slonet.org/~scoward/poop.html).
8.  McDiarmid, Catherine, "What's Wrong with 'Disposable' Single-Use Diapers?,"Born to Love (www.borntolove.com).
9.  Flug, Rachael, "Top Ten Environmental Reasons For Choosing Cotton Diapers.,"Diaperraps (www.ebabydiaper.com). 
10. The Canadian Cloth Diaper Association, "The Facts: Cloth Versus 'Disposable' Diapers."
11.  Fearer, Mark, "Diaper Debate - Not Over Yet."
12.  Michaels, Patricia A., About Guide (http://environment.about.com/library/weekly/aa101600.htm).
13. Iowa Sate University - University Extension, "The Diaper Dilemma."
14. Schiff, Sherry, "The Diaper Dilemma, Waterloo Centre For Groundwater Research.
15.  McConnell, Jane, "The Diaper Debate: Ten Years Later.," (referenced at www.dy-dee.com).
16. Reilly, Lee, "The diaper debate: cloth vs. paper, . . . "(Answering Machine)., Vegetarian Times, March, 1997.
17. "The Diaper Debate" (www.himesa.hn).
18.  Swasy, Alecia, SOAP OPERA; The Inside Story of Procter & Gamble.