The True Fact About Disposable Diapers

Parents wouldn't find disposable diapers nearly so convenient if they religiously followed package directions. When disposables are soiled with feces, manufacturers give clear instructions to rinse them in a toilet before they're discarded. How many parents actually do this? Only about 5 percent, according to waste management consultant, Carl Lehrburger. Human waste, and particularly baby stools, carry more than 100 different intestinal viruses, and this waste simply doesn't belong in landfill sites.

It's an expensive venture for parents to stick exclusively with disposables after their newborn arrives home from the hospital. From birth to successful toilet training, they'll pay out more than $2,100 in the name of diapering convenience. This compares to about $1,750 for a diaper service (charges vary from city to city) or, if you decide to wash your own, $200 for the cloth diapers plus the cost of machine washing and drying.

Multiply the costs of disposable diapers by 85 percent of the annual North American birthrate, and you realize that this business is enormously lucrative for manufacturers—it adds up to an astonishing four billion dollars per year. Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark have a stranglehold on this market. They share 80 percent of total sales, with the majority going to P & G and its two brands, Pampers and Luvs.

No wonder these companies are so relentless in their struggle for greater sales; even a marginal loss of market share means millions of dollars shaved off profits. Look around, and you see signs of the battle everywhere. Parents turning on their TV sets are confronted by appeals from "expert" mothers and authoritative pediatricians, all championing the best disposable.

Today's disposable diaper is a product of technical and scientific wizardry. Compared to the 100 percent cotton diaper, the disposable of the 1990s is made of a dizzying array of materials, ranging from plastics and synthetics for the outer "shell," inner liner, tapes and tabs, to adhesives, gelling crystals, paper tissue and cotton-like layers of wood pulp.

Eighty percent of a throwaway diaper is made from wood pulp, and almost all of it goes to the absorbent "fluff" core. The number of trees destined to be turned into paper diapers is astonishing—the figure most often quoted comes from the Financial Mines of London, which says that one billion trees are cut down annually to serve this market. That's 4.5 trees per baby.

Forests in Scandinavia and the United States are the major sources of wood fiber for diapers. Procter & Gamble insists that no old-growth forest is cut down to satisfy its need for wood fiber, at least not for its diaper products. "Trees are planted and harvested like a crop, like cotton, in accordance with local environmental regulations," says a P & G promotion piece from Britain. Dennis Darby of Procter & Gamble in Toronto maintains that 50 percent of its wood comes from company-owned tree farms, and the rest from private woodlot owners.

Trees such as spruce and pine grow quickly in the southeastern United States where Procter & Gamble's farms are located. Even Canadian diapers are made from this southern pulp, a surprise to us since Canada is the world's largest exporter of pulp and paper. While tree farming ensures that old-growth forest isn't cut down for the sake of one brief application to a baby's bottom—what an ignominious fate for something as lovely as a tree—monoculture fiber farms have problems of their own.

"Harvesting of these forests entails the removal of all the trees in a given area due to economic expedience," says the Women's Environmental Network in Britain. "However, it has been proven that this practice rapidly exhausts the soil capacity unless inorganic fertilizers are applied. In turn, inorganic fertilizers have been exposed as a severe threat to healthy soil and water ecosystems."

Worse, WEN states, is the impact on biodiversity. "Monoculture plantations are not `forests.' They do contain trees, but this is not the sole biological criterion for a forest. Natural forests are diverse and stable, with a variety of tree species of all different ages, living and dead. They are ideal habitats for hundreds, even thousands, of different animals and plants, forming a complex and productive web of associations. Modem forestry ...is is creating a biodiversity crisis.".

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