Nov. 21, 2002, 6:35PM Dirty disposable diapers may take recycling to new level By SUSAN AGER Copyright 2002 Knight Ridder Newspapers Let us gather together to thank the Lord for those among us who can look into a pail of dirty diapers and see promise. I'm speaking of a Canadian company called Knowaste and a California city called Santa Clarita. The city and the company have joined together to launch the nation's first curbside disposable diaper recycling program. Knowaste will haul dirty diapers at no charge to a new plant in Los Angeles where they will be shredded, washed of their contents, then transformed into plastic, wood pulp and polymer that can be turned into things like vinyl siding, wallpaper and insoles for your shoes. Eeyeew. And wow. It's a rare idealist who wraps a baby's bottom in cotton anymore. An estimated 98 percent of parents use disposable diapers, millions of which get dumped in landfills each day, each diaper ripe with human waste. If a Pilgrim baby had arrived on our shores in a Pampers in 1620, that diaper would still be intact. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates disposable diapers require half a millennium to rot away, leaching their contents into the soil. We're dumping almost 7 billion pounds of diapers onto our land each year. That's the weight of more than 8,000 fully fueled, fully loaded 747s. And the trees to make those diapers? Well, experts estimate about two dozen mature trees are lost to produce disposable diapers for every child between birth and potty-training. What a big, smelly, miserable problem we've created for ourselves. It's past time to begin to repair it. Three years ago, Knowaste built its first huge recycling plant in the Netherlands that shreds, cleans and reformulates 70,000 tons of loaded diapers each year. Recycling comes easier to Europeans because land is dearer and landfill fees are much higher than in the wide-open United States. Knowaste's diaper technology was developed, wouldn't you know it, by a woman. Marlene Conway worked at a bank in Ontario when, in 1988, her husband left her to raise their two sons alone. One boy was 3 years old, the other 3 months. She needed money. Her friend advised her to brainstorm a job that would involve what she knew best. At 26, she said later, "What I knew best was diapers." With a couple of business degrees but no technological experience, she managed to study up, find help, found Knowaste and patent the process it now uses. New life for old things. The company is marketing itself as a recycler of not just dirty diapers, but also all "absorbent hygiene products," including incontinence pads, hospital bed pads and feminine hygiene products. Imagine! I like to believe that a century from now, every used diaper and tampon will find new life inside kids' athletic shoes and on hotel bathroom walls. I like to believe that a century from now, every bottle and can and jug and plastic deli tub will be ground up into particles then recast into playground equipment or fancy dinnerware. I like to believe every archaic computer can be picked apart, too, the bits of its brain used to give life to smaller devices, the way we now harvest dead bodies of livers and hearts and eyes we recycle into living beings. And I hope by then we have learned a lesson, to produce nothing that we can't reuse or recycle or return to the earth cleanly, without guilt. Susan Ager is a lifestyle columnist for the Detroit Free Press
Shouldn't they wash the diapers and then shred them? I'd hate to be the poor schmuck that has to clean the shredder!
