Pulp Bleaching And Organo Chlorines in Disposable Diapers

The fluff in most disposable diapers is made from bleached kraft pulp, which uses chlorine-based chemicals as its whitening agent. The remaining disposable diapers on the market are made with Chemi-Thermo-Mechanical Pulp, the chlorine-free process that uses about half the trees required by kraft pulping. Chlorine-free diapers made with CTMP lightened with hydrogen peroxide have been available for several years in Scandinavia and, since early 1989, in Britain under the trade name Peaudouce. CTMP diapers are available in Canada at two supermarket chains, Loblaw's and A&P. In the United States, Seventh Generation offers a chlorine-free product, while the Nappies brand is available through stores such as Stop 'N Shop. Together, however, all chlorine-free diapers comprise only a very small share of the disposable diaper market.

As for dumping organochlorines into our waterways, at least two companies that make kraft fluff for diapers have a much better record than most pulp manufacturers who use chlorine. The reason is simple: they have totally eliminated chlorine gas from their processes. Procter & Gamble and Weyerhaeuser still bleach their pulps with chlorine dioxide, but two preliminary steps discussed in Chapter 2 help reduce its use considerably: 1) extended delignification (the pulp cooks longer than usual in the caustic soda solution to remove lignin), and 2) oxygen delignification, which removes another 50 percent of the unwanted lignin. Only then is the pulp bleached with chlorine dioxide.

The Weyerhaeuser and P & G pulps are similar to the European-style EC (for environmentally compatible) fluff, which means that levels of organochlorines in the water discharges are drastically reduced—to as low as 0.1 kg of AOX per metric ton of pulp in Europe. (Most kraft pulp mills still spew out well over twenty times this level.).

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