Every baby uses about 6,000 nappies before potty training 1That is equivalent to:- 4-5 trees
- 325kg of plastic waste
- 1 tonne of landfill
Production of disposable nappies uses chlorine gas to make them fluffy and white, and by-products include harmful chemicals as dioxins and furans.124
Disposable nappies are not biodegradable take up to 500 years to decompose in landfill sites and can harbour up to 100 different types of virus, including live polio virus from vaccines. These viruses survive for over 2 weeks. Equivalent waste from hospitals is treated as clinical waste and is not deemed safe to be dumped in landfill sites.621
Parts of the disposable nappy do rot (along with the urine and faeces) and this gives off gases including methane (which adds to global warming) and releases acids which can help move chemical wastes into groundwater supplies.14
It is suggested that by the time you have laundered your cloth nappies, the energy cost and waste water makes cloth nappies as environmentally 'un-friendly' as disposables. This is simply not true 1,10,12
These figures 1,10,6 (see table below) show how much MORE of our resources are required for disposable nappies. This table considers total impact: production, use and disposal of nappies and INCLUDES the impact of laundering cloth nappies.
When compared to reusable nappies: | Resource Use | | 3.5 times more | Energy use | | 8 times more | Non-regenerable raw materials | | 90 times more | Renewable material | | 23 times more | Waste water | | 60 times more | Solid waste | | 4 to 30 times more | Land required for growing natural materials |
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