Seven billion gallons of oil are used annually to make diapers.
municipalities in Quebec, the problem of landfi ll waste has become so severe that the province is subsidizing families to buy cloth diapers.41
Sweden, having con-
cluded that plastic diapers use three times as many natural resources as cloth, is considering a fi nancial rebate for families who invest in cloth diapering.42 For the Boulder Community Foothills Hospital, the
decision to switch from disposables to cloth was moti- vated in large part by environmental and health con- cerns. T e numbers are staggering and horrifying, and you’ve probably already read them elsewhere: Today, an average American child who uses only fi ve plastic dia- pers a day (most use many more) will end up contribut- ing 5,000 disposables to America’s landfi lls. Seven bil- lion gallons of oil are used annually to make diapers.43 Even 20 years ago, something like 82,000 tons of plastic and 1.3 million tons of wood pulp (250,000 trees) were used in one year to make throwaway diapers.44
At the
Boulder Community Foothills Hospital, sustainability coordinator Kai Abelkis estimates that, since a laundry service was contracted to wash their custom-made cloth diapers, they’ve kept more than 22,500 diapers from the landfi ll each year. “Reuse is much better than brand-new,” Abelkis says. “It’s part of the whole pack- age of a healthy earth.”
Some
environmentalists and cloth-diaper advocates are
concerned
about the
depiction of
this disposable product as an
ecologically viable
alternative.
the hype about hybrids
Yet even though people understand both the environ- mental and the health reasons to use cloth diapers, the vast majority of Americans are not making the switch. Several small companies are trying to lure more cus- tomers to their products by off ering “hybrid” diapers: cloth shells with disposable inserts. T e best known of these is the gDiaper refi ll, patented by an Australian couple in 2004. T e company gained widespread recog- nition when a cover story in Vanity Fair revealed that Julia Roberts’s son wore gDiapers.45
Compared to the
diaper giants, gDiapers is a small operation: Headquar- tered in Portland, Oregon, they have only 16 employees. But they’ve seen their business grow steadily. “In the last fi ve years consumers are getting more environ- mentally conscious,” says cofounder Kim Graham-Nye, who explains that they chose to launch the company
64 mothering | May–June 2010
in Portland because the city has become a center of sustainability. “Environmental consciousness is a mega- trend. All of society is getting more environmentally aware, and parents are getting there even quicker.”46 Graham-Nye, a breastfeeding, cosleeping mom who
herself used cloth diapers in Australia with her two sons, as well as elimination communication (see Chris- tine Gross-Loh’s article in this issue), says the gDiaper refi ll is an ecological option for parents who are too busy to use cloth: T e wood-pulp interior is made from sustainably grown trees, soiled refi lls are designed to be taken apart and fl ushed down the toilet, and wet refi lls can be put in a home compost bin. T e energy used to make the diapers, down the supply chain, is renewable. Because the company cares about their environmental impact, they worked for three years to get indepen- dently certifi ed for Cradle to Cradle environmental sustainability (an independent certifi cation process to determine if an economic, social, or industrial system is both effi cient and as close to waste-free as possible); in September 2008, the gDiaper refi ll was awarded Gold certifi cation (the highest rating is Platinum). Jay Bolus, MBDC project manager for the gDiapers project, explains that for a company to get certifi ed, it must
“make a safe product from materials that can be recap- tured and recycled, or go back to nature safely and cre- ate healthy soil and plants.” Yet some environmentalists and cloth-diaper advo-
cates are concerned about the depiction of this dispos- able product as an ecologically viable alternative. Graham-Nye, who is very environmentally informed, and who, along with her husband, was credited by Cookie magazine for bringing the diaper into the green age,47
says she’s been pretty beat up by the cloth-diaper-
ing community. T e problem? T e refi lls contain a SAP, one of the same super-absorbent polymers found in all disposable diapers. Graham-Nye told me that she didn’t want this SAP in the product originally. In the absence of a way to make the refi lls absorbent enough without the polymer, Graham-Nye was reassured by scientists and engineers that it was a good choice. But people outside her business aren’t so sure that a throwaway product containing SAPs is really ecologically sustain-
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