Can Disposable Diapers Go Sustainable?

So she worked with regulators, slowly but surely gaining the permissions needed to move forward. “Permitting is always a difficult process with anything in waste management,” says Pollak. But perseverance paid off and, since 2023, a large shipping container near Olympia, Washington, has been ground zero for Diaper Stork’s diapers-to-biochar operations. Diaper Stork and Boo now work together to provide both compostable and cloth diapers to Pollak’s clients, and together the two services have diverted over three million diapers from landfills. 

Pollak is not alone in her ambition to tackle disposable diaper waste. Since 2002, the city of Toronto has kept diapers (and sanitary products) out of landfills by accepting any soiled diaper, other than cloth, in their city-wide Green Bin program, alongside the usual vegetable scraps and coffee grounds. The plastic is then removed from the diapers and turned into synthetic gas, while the solid human waste is turned into compost. 

To date, according to Erwin Pascual, manager of solid waste policy and planning for the City of Toronto, over 854 metric tons of diapers and sanitary products have been diverted from city landfills. “The process is rare across North America,” Pascal says, “because it involves a pretty large investment in the processing infrastructure that can handle plastic-heavy waste.” 

While it is true that waste-to-energy processes such as this significantly help reduce waste volumes, they also raise concerns over the resultant emissions, as well as their health and environmental impacts.

For Kyle Brown, a father of two small children under three years of age, the idea of composting diapers appeals. “My wife and I had ideas of wanting to use reusable diapers and ended up just using traditional [disposable] ones,” Brown says. “I thought [reusables] were going to be a lot more effort and an inconvenience when we were going through a new life experience. I didn’t really know that compostable diapers were a thing.” If he or his wife had known, he says, they would have seriously considered the idea.

But of course, as most parents and caregivers of little ones know, what really matters is absorbency. Leaks can be messy for both the baby and those changing the diaper.  

When Sheri Friesen’s son was born, she decided to use cloth diapers. Compostable diapers in the 1980s were not available. “My mom used them, so I used them,” she says. It was, she admits, a lot of work to wash and clean the diapers. What’s worse is that they’d often leak urine or poop down the baby’s legs or up the back, which also meant extra bath time for the baby. Friesen says she would have used compostable diapers, but only if they were absorbent enough. 

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A recent study from South Africa has not only found that bamboo has greater antibacterial properties compared to cloth diapers, but that bamboo fiber or bamboo textile is highly absorbent.  

Last year, Diaper Stork received a grant of approximately $154,000 from the Washington State Department of Commerce to integrate biochar into composting operations. With this funding, Diaper Stork plans to expand compostable diaper services and research so more parents and caregivers are able to choose sustainable options for their little ones.

The post Can Disposable Diapers Go Sustainable? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

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