Really Pants

Recycling Nappies- A Potential Disaster?

Knowaste, a Canadian firm who already recycle hundreds of thousands of disposable nappies in the US each year is set to open a site in Birmingham.

The initial reaction- great! Any recycling is good, right?

Wrong. There are massive flaws in this system, which will undoubtedly do more harm than good. Why develop such a massive energy consuming system to solve a problem that needn’t exist in the first place?

Knowaste will charge local authorities to dispose of the nappies using their system, and although this may prove cheaper than sending them to the landfill, it is the taxpayer who pays these charges- and the only way to reduce this is by tackling the fundamentals of the problem- which this system does not do.

We need a cultural change. Real Nappies are not difficult to use, and women need to realise that. Our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers all used cloth nappies, often without a washing machine and certainly without a drier- but they did it. We have a much easier time of it- we have the facilities, and we have much easier to use nappies- so why aren’t we all using them?

The answer to the massive problem of disposable nappies is not to recycle them, it is to minimise or stop their production in the first place. Huge amounts of resources are used to produce them, they are full of chemicals, adhesives and plastics which are not good for a babies skin, they are expensive and they are wasteful.

Mothers have said about the new Knowaste system that it will remove the ‘eco-guilt’ that they have in using disposables- they can use them freely with the justification that they will be recycled afterwards. But with only 13% set to actually be recycled this justification is flawed and dangerous.

The answer is a simple one- we have reusable nappies, lets use them!