Real Nappy Week - Greener Disposables?

As it's Real Nappy Week I've been looking into figures and have been totally amazed by the huge numbers of disposable nappies we use each day in the UK.

Dispensing with disposables in the UK would stop almost six million nappies a day, or two billion nappies a year, ending up in landfill. Nappies account for 2% of all household rubbish, and cost the council tax payer £67m a year. A weight of disposeable nappies equivalent to 70,000 double-decker buses go to landfill every year - enough buses to stretch from London to Edinburgh! Disposeable nappy use creates about 400,000 tonnes of waste each year in the UK - roughly the equivalent of the waste produced by a city the size of Birmingham.

So if all these nappies are going into landfill how long do they take to rot away? Since the 1960s disposable nappy manufacturers have increasingly replaced paper with super-absorbent polymers (mainly sodium polyacrylate) which can hold many times their own weight in water. Further innovations have brought a range of plastics for coating and sealing, as
well as perfumes, fragrances and dyes. This has meant that the likelihood of such products
ever being broken down in the environment – even over hundreds of years – is continuing
to recede., and figures are being quoted as between a hundred years and never for a nappy to decompose.

It's clear we have to look at alternatives - either biodegradable disposeables or reuseable "cloth" nappies. It has led to a wave of ‘greener’ disposable nappies which claim to address
some of these issues -

Bambo Nature is the only ‘green nappy’ to be independently accredited. The product also avoids perfumes and other chemicals and features an absorbent starch core.

Moltex Oko contains minimal amounts of gel and no perfumes. They claim to be
compostable.

Nature Babycare although not gel-free, it claims to be based on biodegradable materials and to be chlorine free.

Tushies are the only nappy to use absolutely no gel at all, relying on wood pulp and cotton
for absorbency.

Supermarket own-brands – Both Sainsbury and Asda produce an ‘eco-nappy’ option
claiming greater proportions of biodegradable materials.

Because landfill sites are compacted and covered, decomposition rates are slow. A disposable nappy can take between 100 years and never to decompose, and a biodegradable nappy (by inference) between 5 months and 50 years.

(Source Ethical Consumer Research Report)