What are we going to do when dipers are banned?

[LittleEnigma]

That would be a very unpopular move, can't see that happening. What about people with IC or other medical conditions requiring people to wear out of need?

 

[Nowididit]

That's not going to happen. Too many mum's to fight it.

It's not that at all. It's all about the money the different industry sectors will lose. Does anyone really believe that the oil industry is gonna take a huge financial hit by losing the product sales to produce the various diaper components? Does any really think the big disposable diaper manufacturers give 2 shits about the environment?
We are living in a world that's fastly becoming dumbed down by producing products that are making our lives easier and easier. Very few ppl are willing to give up the ease of use and toss of disposable diapers to wash and dry cloth and plastic pants, especially working families.
20 years ago there was talk about ridding single use water bottles. How about paper straws? How long did that last?
I say this. Everything...and I mean everything...we use has come from the earth. So if it comes from the earth then it can go back in the earth.
As far as the atmosphere? This planet has been belching out noxious and deadly gasses for eons before we came along. What gasses we're producing is hardly a hiccup in the time frame of 4 billion plus years.

 

[Tasmaniandevilpadded]

Lucky for United States are never banned for plastic. Thank God for what reason people who need a diapers for babies, elderly, and disabled people are wearing.

 

[bigtoddler96]

Lucky for United States are never banned for plastic. Thank God for what reason people who need a diapers for babies, elderly, and disabled people are wearing.

ABDL people also need diapers.

 

[MikeDJ]

If they were going to ban them it shouldve happened years ago to seriously attack the problem. If anything its baby diapers that would be the bulk of the problem, not so much ABDL diapers. They often cite the AbdL market as being small (or only a niche) compared to the main stream baby market. They would also have to ban so much other plastic products. I cant get over how much plastic packaging is thrown out when opening new products also all the plastic bags and wraps that are used. A lot of that goes in landfills as well. If there was going to be any big bans it would be focusing on all the plastic used and being disposed of, not just diapers.

 

[Garzilla]

Isn’t there a company out there that is turning large quantities of used disposables into artificial diamonds? Or something like that.

Seriously though, I honestly can not see diapers being banned for a number of reasons. Foremost is the fact that most people enter there lives incontinent and there are generally very limited ways of dealing with this. We can let the little ones go around without diapers which results in a lot of laundry, we can use cloth which also comes with a lot of laundry or we have disposables.

Living in an area with lots of little ones and some pretty serious droughts I will say that banning the disposable is probably not happening. Not to mention the huge companies that would end up being shut down by the disappearance of such diapers.

About the only solution would be to stop having babies. But we still have plenty who would remain incontinent.

Adding a tax is interesting but this would basically be a tax on babies, the old, some disabled, etc. This would be problematic.

 

[KrankyPants]

I'd probably wet myself. I honestly need them at night.

 

[diaperdawg]

This gets to the crux of many environmental issues. There is no easy answer!

Take away gas burning cars and you are strip mining and destroying areas to harvest enough lithium for batteries.

Take away disposable diapers and the amount of water and detergent to clean the cloth ones catches up quickly.


The only real option is to give people birth control options and keep our population size to a point that the planet can sustain it and try to move to renewables as much as possible for everything else. Heck... one of my daughters was just stating she'd love a tax incentive to not have kids and would bank that money forever!

 

[Fleetwoodmac32192]

I remember seeing recently:

Pull-Ups New Leaf is made with plant-based ingredients like sugarcane and fluff pulp.

If they can do it for Huggies pull-ups, can the same be done for adult products? Is using plant based ingredients a good idea? I would rather wear a diaper than have wet or stinky regular underwear.

 

[Belarin]

I remember seeing recently:

Pull-Ups New Leaf is made with plant-based ingredients like sugarcane and fluff pulp.

If they can do it for Huggies pull-ups, can the same be done for adult products? Is using plant based ingredients a good idea? I would rather wear a diaper than have wet or stinky regular underwear.

It's the same thing as the Pamper Harmonie, "organic", "natural fiber", "plant based" etc. are all just buzzwords and marketing gimmicks aimed at the environmentalists to make them think they are doing their part by switching to environmentally friendly materials, and to keep them from making a fuss.

Don't get me wrong it is a little bit of an improvement but the fluff used in 90% of nappies is already made from wood pulp and other natural fibers, the whole thing about using sugarcane or cotton etc. is more about the outer covers which still need to be made waterproof somehow, this could be done using celulose but it wouldn't help the environment by much. A little less microplastics is great, sure, but what about the other components that as yet do not have a suitable alternative (like SAP).

There is also much more to consider than just the materials they are made from though, if they begin making all diapers out of "organic" or "natural" fibers like cotton, sugarcane, bamboo etc. there is a whole huge processing system that would completely counteract any good those materials would do, starting with farms.

You would need a lot more and bigger farms to grow all of these plants taking up a lot more water, use (and production of) pesticides and leaching nutrients from the soil, then there is the extra machines that harvest of all that material, transportation of it to a proccessing facility to turn it into usable fibers (and the chemical waste they produce as a byproduct) and then another factory to turn those fibers into a textile. More transporting and storage of those textiles to the factories that produce the diapers...

Switching out materials seems like a good start but the impact that has further back down the line is generally unseen because everyone is so focused on the end product.

 

[BobbiSueEllen]

Pampers and all other diaper makers pay lip-service to everyone when they talk about Pampers and the environment in the same breath. As long as they keep putting the current version of SAP in diapers, they will never be recyclable, reclaimable or biodegradable. Ever.

A company in India has discovered a new form of absorbent, crystalline material identical to SAP...but made from seafood by-product. They're already marketing it but I'm not sure it's in a sufficient quantity to meet the need of the world diaper market...or even that of India. If they can do it, it'll make diaper fluff compostable, reclaimable (just not flushable); the inner & outer layers will still not recycle and will need trashing. But like old Pampers, rip open an end, shake the padding out and toss the plastic. Far, far less waste.

Until Pampers went hourglass and used SAP, they were vastly more Earth-friendly than now. They had instructions on every box on how to flush the padding down...hardly anyone did back then. We're crying out for it now, aren't we?

 

[oldpppants]

I used to live in Arizona, when my kids were diaper age. The argument there was: disposable diapers take up lots of landfill space and while the paper part degrades pretty fast the plastic part.... well we know about plastic. Cloth diapers require a lot of water to wash and in Arizona water has always been a finite resource. So it's a toss-up?

Another interesting thing I heard recently: you'd have to use cloth grocery bags thousands of times to offset their environmental impact, making them worse than plastic. Not sure I believe that, but it's out there.

 

[Tasmaniandevilpadded]

Plastic sheeting, cotton fibers, and sodium acrylic was made a disposable diapers.

 

[BracedDL]

Compostable nappies would be better.
Biodegradable leaves some small stuff whereas compostable breaks down completely.

 

[12srepaid]

I'm against taxing people on certain products. I'm also not keen on banning products.
There's plenty of Common Sense ways to help fix pollution, than to have these power grabs.