From: bwolfe@trentu.ca (BEN WOLFE)
Subject: Diapers and the Environment (Was Re: Diaper Services)
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Organization: Trent University Computer Services Department
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 19:06:00 GMT

A couple of recent posts have quoted an article in "Garbage" magazine
and one from the New York Times which purport to back up the disposable
diaper industry's claim that disposables and cloth diapers have about
the same impact on the environment.

I work for a community environmental project in Ontario (the Peterborough
Green-Up) and have spent some time looking at the studies involved, and
I can tell you that much as users of disposables might want to ease their
consciences, it just isn't so.

The debate now centres on a type of environmental study called life cycle
analysis, in which all impacts of a product from extraction through use
and disposal are quantified. In general it's a useful approach, but since
the data about many detailed aspects of resource use and disposal do not
exist or are disputed, the reality is that these studies are based on a
huge number of often questionable assumptions.

The studies that purport to show disposables are no worse than cloth
diapers were contracted and paid for by the big diaper companies. So guess
whose views influenced the assumptions? There are two main studies, one by
Arthur D. Little consultants and the other by Franklin Associates. The
first is a transparent sham. It uses 15-year-old data for the energy
consumption of washers and dryers, claims there have been no significant
improvements in cloth diapers since our grandparents days, distorts the
relative costs involved by adding the price of a new washer and dryer to
the cloth side, etc., etc. It's so shabby that when I called senior Procter
and Gamble people to ask questions about it they willingly disowned it --
though it was still being quoted in their advertising at the time as
evidence for their environmental claims.

The Franklin Associates study is better, and has made the debate more
sophisticated by raising some legitimate questions about relative energy
use and non-sustainable methods of growing cotton, but ultimately it too
is a case of "he who pays the piper calls the tune." An example: Franklin's
researchers calculate the overall solid waste produced by a baby diapered
in disposables to be 7 times greater than for a baby diapered in cloth.
The Recycling Council of Ontario checked this calculation using Franklin's
own figures and found the true total to be more like sevseral *hundred*
times as much waste from disposables, as should be intuitively obvious.

Raising the issue of sewage as an environmental impact of cloth diapering
is pretty ludicrous as far as I'm concerned. First of all, disposables are
supposed to be rinsed in the toilet, as landfill sites are not designed to
hold human waste. But beyond that, the sewage system is *designed* to
handle and treat sewage, with pretty modest impacts on the environment.
A baby has no more impact in this way than any of the rest of us. Doesn't
it seem like someone with an agenda is really reaching when this is
compared with the plastics industry, land-destroying, chemical-intensive
forestry (no, these bioengineered monocultures are NOT sustainable), and
vast amounts of solid waste?

People, North America throws out about 20 *billion* soiled disposable
diapers a year. One baby diapered in disposables can produce about 3,000
pounds of solid waste before toilet training is achieved. This year marks
the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing in North America. 500 years from
now, two dozen generations in the future, the disposable diapers we threw
away in 1992 after reading corporate misinformation will still be sitting
in landfill sites.

I think there are a lot of good reasons that diapers have become a
symbolic environmental issue. As parents of young children (and yes, I
have one in diapers and one recently out of them) we have the responsi-
bility for preparing the future they will live in. Does it really make
any sense to you to take a space-age product that will last for five
centuries and wrap it around your child's waist for a few hours, and then
toss it away, soiled, for someone in some other place or time to deal with?

I live in a town of 65,000 which currently supports two diaper services.
They cost less than disposables, and are almost as convenient. Yes,
convenience is nice, but there are other values that are more enduring and
important.

Ben Wolfe

From: janem@hpfcdc.fc.hp.com (Jane Marcus)
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 17:26:00 GMT
Subject: Re: How to help the "oops" of a family...
Organization: HP Fort Collins, Co.