Do you think they will eventually ban plastic backed nappies?

Here in the U.K. there has been a lot of news on television about the plastic problem especially in the sea and how best to deal with with it. Do you think they willl eventually ban plastic backed nappies? Do you think with it being a medical issue they will leave them alone because quite a lot of medical things use plastic. Also cloth backed nappies use some form of plastic outing, they aren't entirely cloth. I know for me it makes me anxious thinking about one day that their won't be any more plastic backed nappies. What are your thought?

If plastic backed diapers were banned in the UK, then the ABDL companies would either have to figure out a way to create specially designed diapers for the UK market or exit the UK completely, which would be a sad day for the British ABDLs.

I doubt it, we're such a small fish in that pond(no pun intended) that it wouldn't really do anything for the issue if they instituted such a ban, and I doubt any representatives are really considering diapers when they talk about this stuff.

All disposable nappies are made almost entirely of plastic and other oil derived products, regardless of there outer covering.
The only exception being the wood pulp used in the padding, the only biodegradable part of most nappies.
While a ban on disposables would be a bit drastic, the materials they use and the landfill they create are definitely unsustainable long term.

bobbilly said:

Do you think they will eventually ban plastic backed nappies?

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They can't even attempt it until there's a good alternative available. You can't just ban something that people need or even the honest people are just going to ignore your ban or find ways to beat the system.

Also by "alternative" I mean something that serves most of the primary functions. For disposable diapers, this includes the disposability, low cost, and convenience, which are features that cloth diapers for example do not offer.

It's not like this is a problem nobody has been trying to solve - disposable diapers have been getting optimized for years and I doubt there's going to be any new discovery that starts out a new design that comes close enough to the performance of current plastic disposables to be seriously considered.

I'm still waiting for the "true recycling revolution" to begin. We're not throwing away and burying trash, we're burying what will turn out to be valuable resources years from now. I expect in 30 years we will have entire industries centered around excavating landfills to reprocess and recycle what's been buried in them. There will come a time when resources like copper are available in higher concentrations in a landfill than in any mine.

The basic problem is separation of materials. Even now we tend to go for the "low hanging fruit", where what we want is in high concentration and little effort has to be done in separating out what they want from what they don't want. Dumps (and things like circuit boards) are the enemy, they have a very fine mix of a wide variety of things that are either mechanically difficult to separate, are mixed together in too small of pieces, have too great a variety of different materials, or a combination of those traits. The gathering of materials is not the problem - there's a virtually unlimited supply. The problem is in the separation. We're still not very good at that, and I think that's where the innovation needs to come from.

Extracting one thing without ruining something else you also want is a problem too. For example, you can incinerate a circuit board to get the metals like gold, silver, and copper, but that destroys any plastics and generates lots of toxic compounds you then have to deal with, many of which if broken down into safer pieces are of little value. I envision a future miracle recycling machine that you just drop anything into the chute at the top and it does its thing, and down below there's a hundred bins that the elemental components drop into. A bin that starts filling with carbon powder, another one filling with copper powder, a cylinder filling with oxygen, etc. I don't know if we'll ever get there, but that's the ultimate solution to garbage AND resource scarcity at the same time, and will make questions like "paper or plastic?" no longer matter.

Limiting plastic diapers doesn't fix the problem, it only postpones the inevitable. One way or another, until you are recycling everything, the dumps just keep getting fuller.

Even cloth backed diapers are made of plastic, so no, it would be impossible to ban them.

Not even remotely likely. Like mayhem said, even those clothlike disposables have a plastic lining in them. And as already said, there are no good alternatives to fully plastic backed diapers.

Take them away, and you'd have a butt load of pissed (literal and figurative) disabled people. That would be political suicide for any politician attempting to remove them.

I'm not sure what would happen exactly. I'd say there are a few likely outcomes to any laws coming into place banning manufacture of disposable plastic products like that.

Most likely manufacturers would be forced to embrace the newer "bio" plastics made from plants instead of petroleum. It's been around for awhile but manufacturers don't utilize it because it isn't mass produced, ergo, more expensive. If demand for it suddenly became a thing i gurantee they would find ways of mass producing it.

Scenario 2 would be a shift twords cloth backed diapers like ABU's cloth pre-schools. The good thing about this scenario is we may actually start seeing some decent adult sized pull ups getting made.

Scenario 3 would be the most out there solution but I could see it happening as well. Basically the diaper manufacturers would simply shut down production of disposables all together and everything would go back to all cloth.

If you're a fan of plastic backed disposables, I'd assume most of us are, then scenario number 1 would be the most ideal.

They ban plastic backed diapers they better be prepared to pay for my laundry and new furniture each day. and repeal public urination laws and strip the labeling a person as a sex offender too due to a medial condition. They dang well better think before they do something stupid like that!! There is enough oil in the ground to make 20 million years worth of diapers so there should be no need to ban plastic period besides eventually that plastic will degrade back to its natural elements. either that or use diapers as fuel for the steel mills and power plants instead of using natural gas that can be used in homes at a lower cost.

bobbilly said:

Also cloth backed nappies use some form of plastic outing, they aren't entirely cloth.

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That "cloth backing" isn't cloth -- it's non-woven polypropylene. You can't really make a diaper without plastic, as its needed to make the diaper waterproof. There's no cheaper/better alternative.

Some manufacturers are experimenting with using cotton treated with hydrophobic chemicals in disposable diapers, but I'm not sure whether any have made it into production yet.

https://www.nonwovens-industry.com/...4-01-23/cotton-topsheet-developed-for-diapers

Yeah, the only possible ban would be on disposables full stop.

I'm sure that's a long way off, if it's ever possible, for practical reasons. But they may well start taxing the crap out of them and/or subsidising washable alternatives, for both baby and adult users.