EcoKnights®

It’s 3am and your newborn baby is crying, again. Your half-asleep partner gives you a quick nudge as a reminder that it’s your turn, so you sombrely make it to your feet and mosey to the baby room. While checking on the little one, you can see by the look on her face that this is not just a request for a quick ‘rock-a-bye’ session, but instead that she’s got a nice little present with your name on it.

Without hesitation, you begin to go through the motions that have become like clockwork; a wipe here, a little powder there, and just your luck, there’s one disposable nappy left. Suddenly something hits you, maybe it was the VOC free paint you used in the baby’s room clearing your head, the clarity that can only come with prolonged sleep deprivation, or upon admiring the ‘Future Environmental Warrior’ onesie, and you begin to wonder if going with disposable nappies was the best option for the environment. Well I can assure you that you are not the only one facing this question and that, once again, our good friend Mr. Life Cycle Assessment is here to save the day.

Every year 800 million disposable nappies are dumped in Australian landfills, making up approximately 5% of landfill content (1). With that being said, cotton (the most common material for reusable nappies) requires 12 mega litres of water per hectare to cultivate (2), and a significant amount of energy and more water nearly every day to wash and clean reusable nappies. So which option is the best? To get the answer to this challenging question were going to have to put on our life-cycle thinking caps once again.

The Technical Stuff...

After further research and review of some already existing life cycle studies on nappies (3, 4), the nappy options and life cycle stages can be understood in the following way.

Option 1: Disposable Nappy

Life Cycle Summary: Softwood Growth and Production; Softwood Pulping Mill; Nappy Manufacturing using Pulp and Additional Plastics; Nappy Use; and Nappy Disposal (Transport throughout).

Option 2: Reusable Nappy

Life Cycle Summary: Cotton Growth, Production and Processing; Nappy Manufacturing; Nappy Use; Nappy Soaking, Washing, Drying and Wastewater Treatment/Disposal; and Nappy Disposal (Transport throughout).

Three main options are being considered in the study: Disposable Nappies, Reusable Nappies with an efficient washing machine, and Reusable Nappies with a less-efficient washing machine. Note that other nappy options exist (e.g. compostable and alternative material nappies) but due to limitations in the scope of the study these three most common options were selected. The reusable nappies are assumed to be dried on a clothesline. The functional unit being applied is 2.5 years of nappy use, which is the average time period of nappy use for one child. The average weight of a single disposable nappy is 50g and 125g for a cotton reusable. An estimated 5,020 disposable and 36 reusable nappies will be used over this time period. The study is limited to these three choices in order to focus on the most common material options; pulp and plastics for disposable and cotton for reusable.

The same method as used in The Hand Drying Dilemma Article, is used to deliver the results of the study in a way that can be understood in eco-points, which provides a single environmental performance score for each option being assessed based on the environmental impact it contributes to over its entire life. For reference, 100 eco-points is equivalent to the annual environmental impact of one Australian citizen in terms of emissions, waste and resource consumption.

Hurry up! Time for a Change!?!

Keep on Reusing!

So with respect to the overall results- assuming an average Australian family in a sunny State with a cloth line in the back yard- for these two options, those of you that are rocking out your cotton-bottom babies- Good Choice!!, and for the rest, maybe the next time you run out of those disposable doo-dads consider giving the landfill-saving, future-environmental-warrior-friendly reusable nappies on a go.

Please note that the purpose of this study is not to give you the end-all answer to your environmental decision making but instead to get you thinking how we can do better by considering the impact our products contribute to over their entire life. Or as O’Brien et al. (3) found: The major difference between the nappy systems, according to, is that the user has much more control over the environmental impact of home-washed reusables. There are still plenty other great nappy options that are available, such as compostable nappies and hemp or bamboo fabric. The key is to continue asking these questions to your providers and reminding yourself that every dollar is a vote.

Written by Ben Kneppers, LCA Practitioner, Edge Environment

Source from: The Green Pages.