UK Govt: Disposable diapers are better for the environment!
It’s a commonly held belief amongst green parents that cloth diapers, or nappies as they are called in the UK, are better for the environment than disposable ones.However, a new UK government report finds exactly the opposite: disposable diapers are better for the environment.
Government ministers couldn’t believe the result of this report and buried it, because they were embarrassed by the findings. According to the Times Online:
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has instructed civil servants not to publicise the conclusions of the £50,000 nappy research project and to adopt a “defensive” stance towards its conclusions. The report found that using washable nappies, hailed by councils throughout Britain as a key way of saving the planet, have a higher carbon footprint than their disposable equivalents unless parents adopt an extreme approach to laundering them. To reduce the impact of cloth nappies on climate change parents would have to hang wet nappies out to dry all year round, keep them for years for use on younger children, and make sure the water in their washing machines does not exceed 60C.
The report found that while disposable nappies used over 2½ years would have a global warming impact of 550kg of CO2, reusable nappies produced 570kg of CO2 on average. But if parents used tumble dryers and washed the reusable nappies at 90C, the impact could spiral to 993kg of CO2. A Defra spokesman said the government was shelving plans for future research on nappies.
However, it appears that the report did not consider the impact on landfills of disposable diapers – which is a truly enormous consideration.
