It’s sickening to realize that
completely decompose, because it is estimated that each disposable will take
no one alive today has lived long enough to see
hundreds of years to do so.
the company $37.3 billion.26 Pampers, P&G’s largest
brand, reported net sales of about $8 billion in 2009,27 up from $6 billion in 2005.28
Kimberly-Clark, which
makes Huggies, reported earnings of $4.6 billion on diaper sales in 2008.29 To call these manufacturers giants is an understate-
ment. Tey are goliath companies with extremely aggressive and oſten ethically questionable busi- ness practices, many of which have been exposed and questioned in Wall Street Journal reporter Alecia
Swasy’s Soap Opera: Te Inside Story of Procter & Gamble.30
for the environment
Although the plastic-diaper industry has spent hun- dreds of thousands of dollars trying to refute claims that disposable diapers are bad for the environment,31 some of the claims are simply irrefutable. Disposable diapers contain petroleum-based ingredients that are made from oil, a nonrenewable resource. Kimberly- Clark, which announced a net sales decrease of 6 percent in the second quarter of 2009,32
cloth is better
mentions
We have a concept of
“taking the garbage out,”
but really,
the garbage does not go
anywhere.
the problem of diminishing petroleum in their 2008 annual report to shareholders as a possible risk to the company’s financial well-being: “A number of the Corporation’s products, such as diapers, training and youth pants, incontinence care products, dispos- able wipes and various health care products, contain certain materials which are principally derived from petroleum. Tese materials are subject to price fluc- tuations based on changes in petroleum prices, avail- ability and other factors.”33 A child who wears plastic diapers creates an enor-
mous amount of waste. We have a concept of “taking the garbage out,” but really, the garbage does not go anywhere. Plastic diapers clog our already overtaxed landfills, which leak noxious gases into the atmo- sphere and pollute our rivers, streams, and oceans. It’s sickening to realize that no one alive today has lived long enough to see a single disposable diaper
62 mothering | May–June 2010
a single disposable diaper
You want to think about what you’re putting on the most vulnerable skin—
a newborn baby’s skin.
DEBORAH GORDON, MD
completely decompose, because it is estimated that each disposable will take hundreds of years to do so.34 If you want to see what this means visually, gDiapers has made an 86-second video of footage from soil trials in Australia comparing three products: a chlorine- free disposable diaper, a conventional disposable diaper, and a gDiaper insert (also made partly from petrochemi- cals).35
Aſter an entire year in
a compost pile, while the gDiaper insert has mostly
decomposed, the bright, white disposable diapers look exactly
and eerily the same. (According to the Vancouver study referenced below, neither the SAP nor the cellulose the gDiapers contain is biodegradable.36
) Or ask J. Maarten Troost, author of Te Sex Lives
of Cannibals: Adriſt in the Equatorial Pacific. Troost
details how the pollution of disposable diapers has come even to a remote island in an atoll in the Repub- lic of Kiribati, 5,000 miles from anywhere. Stinking disposable diapers used by islanders were littered around his house37
and stuck to the coral reefs, rot-
ting and fetid in the sun. One day, when Troost was out diving, he unexpectedly found some live coral (the pollution on Tarawa is so bad that most of the coral around the island is dead), which he describes as a “few splashes of color on an abused reef.” Unfor- tunately, Troost writes, “Elsewhere the color was provided by those with advanced degrees in mar- keting and package engineering. Tere was rubbish everywhere, cans and rags and diapers listlessly sway- ing in the current. Swimming through and around this garbage were parrotfish and Great Trevallies and longnose emperors. . . . It was disheartening seeing what was being done to their habitat.”38 Closer to home, disposable diapers are among the
most common consumer products by weight and vol- ume in American landfills. Toronto is generating so much waste that cannot be accommodated by its land- fills that, every day, the city is actually shipping more than 70 truckloads of waste to landfill space in Michi- gan.39
From January to August 2007, more than 440,000 tons of Toronto’s trash was sent to Michigan.40
In some
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