If you care deeply as we do about the environment and the world our children will inherit, you will be shocked and saddened to hear just how tremendous the impact of single use nappies have on our planet. The average baby uses up to 6,000 disposable nappies from birth to age 2.5years, that's just ONE CHILD. And all those 6,000 nappies end up in landfill and it can take up to 500 years for EACH NAPPY to degrade. There are 2 billion children under 14 years old on the planet right now. That is an inconceivable amount of nappy waste in landfill. We urgently have to address this issue and we hope that our range of reusable nappies can make a positive contribution to that change.
Below are some facts & figures from a policy paper by ZERO WASTE EUROPE.
Some alarming facts about single use disposable nappies:
Single-use baby nappies are designed to be used just once and thrown away. They are made of 61% of plastic and other mixed materials (common ingredients include wood pulp, cotton, viscose rayon, polyester, polyethylene, polypropylene, adhesives, and dyes). Together with the presence of organic/excreta after use, this makes their collection and recycling technically and economically complex and expensive. In 2017, it was estimated that 6.7 million tonnes of single-use nappies waste was generated in the EU-28 (2.7% of the total municipal solid waste), which typically end up in landfills (87%) or are incinerated (13%), wasting resources and producing negative environmental impacts. In addition, there is a significant impact also coming from the production process of these products.
Check out some data below:
● It takes over 1,500 litres of crude oil to produce enough single-use nappies for a newborn baby until they become potty trained (at 2.5 years);
● More than 90% of water and energy consumption and land use occurs during the pre-use stage of the single-use nappy life cycle (softwood production, pulping and nappy industrial production).
Likewise, the use of single-use nappies by a child over a two and a half year period (which is the average time children use a nappy) would result in producing approximately 550 kg of CO2 while increasing global warming and exacerbating climate change. This equates to an estimated total global warming potential in the EU-27 of approximately 3.3Mt of CO2 equivalents per year (assuming
there are 15 million babies using nappies in Europe)
And the BENEFITS of using reusable cloth nappies:
Waste reduction: A family that chooses reusable baby nappies can prevent 99% of the waste that would be generated by using single-use ones. These reusable nappies can reduce nearly 900kg of waste generated by one child during the first 2 years of age. It means that if only 20% of children using nappies switched to reusables, the amount of waste that could be prevented in the EU-27 would be more than 1 million tonnes being generated annually, going from 6.7 to 5.4 million tonnes. Moreover, these nappies can be reused when the baby has grown up, meaning that they could be used by other children, relatives, friends, or others.
● CO2 emissions: The carbon footprint of a nappy can be reduced by 40%, equivalent to some 200kg of CO2, over the two and a half years, by swapping to reusables. This reduction is possible by washing nappies in a fuller load, outdoor line drying all of the time, not washing above 60°C and reusing nappies either with a second child (if it is the case) or acquiring them via second-hand
market.
● Resource use: Single-use baby nappies use 20 times more land for production of raw materials and require three times more energy to make than baby cloth nappies
So please please give reusable nappies a try, even just one a day, that would reduce landfill by 1000 nappies over the first 2.5 years of your baby's life! If we all did that the positive impact would be phenomenal.