Business Daily: The Nappy Problem

[nelsonic]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct31cy

[iteles]

Sadly this is not a great podcast. It gives you a small amount of information on how bad disposables are for landfill and then gives you the ones piece of somewhat interesting information: eco-disposables aren't that much better because in reality they don't biodegrade in landfill, they rely on an industrial biodegradation process which just didn't happen.

They then spend some time discussing gDiapers which are super interesting and fully compostable but only in pilot stages in Indonesia and miter of report is the story of how they came into being rather than anything went the diapers or their future.

The portion dedicated to reusables is very shallow and anecdotal: a chat with a neighbor who uses them. There is no addressing ANY of the questions people have as to whether they really are better for the environment, it's just assumed. Worse: this neighbor says the reason she stopped using them and because you ' have to go a 60 degree wash cycle EVERY morning to get rid of the biggest impurities before your main wash every few days', she stopped using them when she went back to work because she couldn't keep up with the laundry. Not only is this bad advice telling listeners to do something that is very laborious and actually incorrect (semi-washing and leaving the diapers sopping we only encourages the proliferation of bacteria and walking straight away at 60 'bakes ina' smells), but she is advocating a practice that is against manufacturer recommendations (who suggest for almost every brand that you should wash at 40) and reduces the lifespan of the diapers, particularly of the elastics.

In the end it may be alerting people to the existence of an alternative, but starts them off with a bad practice and immediately tells it's more laborious than it already is 😩

[nelsonic]

@iteles I wasn't sharing the podcast episode as being "great" ... Rather, sharing it because it's a topic that affects enough people that Business Daily - one of the most popular podcasts in the world - deemed worthy of coverage. Highlights how few people do reusable diapers.

"It became a bit of an obsession because there are so many lovely prints..." "I stopped doing reusables because I went back to work full-time and it was inconceivable .."

The stats in the episode - which I would assume are fact checked by the BBC - are relevant:

• The average child uses between 4000 and 6000 disposable diapers before they are toilet trained.
• 250 Million Barrels of Crue Oil are used for Disposable Diapers each year.
• Every minute over 300,000 plastic disposable diapers enter landfills or pollute our oceans.
• 21% of Indonesia's Ocean Plastic problem is Disposable Diapers! 😮 i.e. you walk on the beach and you'll see a disposable nappy. 😧

Disposable diapers can be seen in coral reefs in Bali! 🤦‍♂️

• The average cost per disposable nappy is $0.28 but the actual cost including to the environment is over $3.00 per nappy. The environmental damage is never factored into the price people pay for disposables. gdiapers.com claim the biodegradable diapers cost $1 per diaper.

The BBC interviewer is a bit of a muppet referring to Disposables as "Traditional". They are only the "Tradition" because P&G and Kimberly-Clark made it that way with Billions of marketing dollars!!

The episode definitely doesn't have a practical "next steps". But the final speaker does make a valid

Claims the average saving for reusables is between €200 - €2000 over disposables. But this doesn't factor the person's time to scrape, wash, hand and "setup" the reusables. If we factor time the cost (to the family) of reusables dwarfs disposables.

Time breakdown: I've timed all these activities multiple times, these are the best-case:

• 5 mins per day of scraping poop. Probably the most unpleasant task I can think of.
• 7 mins per load to carry the diaper load from the changing area to the washing machine and put on the first load (1/3)
• 2 mins to walk back to the washing machine and put on the "main" load
• 2 mins to put on the final rinse + spin cycle
• 20 mins to carry diaper load to washing line and hang all diapers
• 20 mins to setup all diapers for use; putting liners and absorbers in for morning vs. afternoon diapers.
• 2 mins transporting diapers from laundry room to storage

Total: 58 mins. This is the best-case scenario. So 1 Hour If we assume an hourly value of €8/hour.

Total time the diapers spend in the machine per load: 8 hours. Energy used: ~6kw. Average price per kWh: €0.20 (we pay less because we're on an "industrial" tariff because we know we use a lot of 100% renewable energy ...) but just for reference. So €1.20 per washing machine load.

Laundry detergent: €0.13 per load. e.g. we pay €10** for a 80 washes box of A+:

Finally, the hidden/indirect cost of drying the diapers, is having the dehumidifier on 24/7 in the laundry room. The dehumidifier uses 300W/h or 0.3kWh and diapers take 2 days to dry. So 24 x 2 x 0.3 = 14.4kWh ... 14.4kWh x €0.20 =€2.88` per load.

Total cost: €8 + €1.20 + €0.13 + €2.88 = €12.21 per load

If 20 diapers are washed in each load the cost per use of a reusable diaper is: €12.21 / 20 = €0.61

Note: Please feel free to fact-check these numbers. 🙏

€0.61 per use of a Reusable Diaper.

This doesn't factor the time it took @iteles to research the reusables or the up-front cash to buy them.

This cost is still considerably more than the estimated total lifecycle cost of disposables mentioned in the Business Daily episode of $3/diaper.

So as a purely financial - self-interested - decision, reusables are a terrible idea. 💸 Because the ongoing costs of both time, electricity, water & detergent dwarf the price of disposables. If the person doing the laundry happens to be a Top 1% in the World Software Engineer ... the €8/hour figure above has to be adjusted by a factor. 🙄

if we as "conscious consumers" want to "do the right thing" and not send thousands of tons of plastic waste to landfill and worse, the ocean! Then this is our only option right now. 💭

Image credit: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/baby-diapers-ocean-plastic_n_5cb77ea7e4b096f7d2db869b

Systematic Solution? 🤷‍♂️

Which brings me back to my earlier point: we need a much better system for this! Not just for us but for all the people who want to "do the right thing". There needs to be a systematic laundry service that lowers this cost from €0.61 per use to something comparable to the disposables. A subscription service that collects the diapers and returns them all ready to be used much like a commercial laundry service as used by a Hotel or Restaurant. This would need to be run as a non-profit with EU/Gov funding with the environment angle. So costs would need to be hyper controlled. It could be run by disadvantaged mums who need extra hours - part-time work - to pay their bills. The whole thing could be a really good business. But trying to run it for-profit would defeat the objective. 💭

Anyway ... ⏳