50 Million Tons of Thermoplastic Resin Later...

'How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder

January 19, 2010 | Issue 46•03

A local resident discards a plastic bottle—just as he has done his whole life—with no perceivable effect on the environment.

WASHINGTON—Wishing to dispose of the empty plastic container, and failing to spot a recycling bin nearby, an estimated 30 million Americans asked themselves Monday how bad throwing away a single bottle of water could really be.

"It's fine, it's fine," thought Maine native Sheila Hodge, echoing the exact sentiments of Chicago-area resident Phillip Ragowski, recent Florida transplant Margaret Lowery, and Kansas City business owner Brian McMillan, as they tossed the polyethylene terephthalate object into an awaiting trash can. "It's just one bottle. And I'm usually pretty good about this sort of thing."

"Not a big deal," continued roughly one-tenth of the nation's population.

According to the inner monologue of millions upon millions of citizens, while not necessarily ideal, throwing away one empty bottle probably wouldn't make that much of a difference, and could even be forgiven, considering how long they had been carrying it around with them, the time that could be saved by just tossing it out right here, and the fact that they had bicycled to work once last July.

In addition, pretty much the entire states of Missouri and New Mexico calmly reassured themselves Monday that they definitely knew better than to do something like this, but admitted that hey, nobody is perfect, and at least they weren't still using those horrible aerosol cans, or just throwing garbage directly on the ground.

All agreed that disposing of what would eventually amount to 50 tons of thermoplastic polymer resin wasn't the end of the world.

"It's not like I don't care, because I do, and most of the time I don't even buy bottled water," thought Missouri school teacher Heather Delamere, the 450,000th caring and progressive individual to have done so that morning, and the 850,000th to have purchased the environmentally damaging vessel due to being thirsty, in a huge rush, and away from home. "It's really not worth beating myself up over."

"What's one little bottle in the grand scheme of things, you know?" added each and every single one of them.

Monday's plastic-bottle-related dilemma wasn't the only environmental quandary facing millions of citizens across the country. An estimated 20 million men and women wondered how wasteful leaving a single lightbulb on all night really was, while more than 40 million Americans asked themselves if anyone would actually notice if they just turned up the heat a few degrees instead of walking all the way downstairs and getting another blanket.

Likewise, had they not been so tired, and busy, and stressed, citizens making up the equivalent of three major metropolitan areas told reporters that they probably wouldn't have driven their minivans down to the corner store.

"Relax," thousands upon thousands of Americans quietly whispered to themselves as they tossed two articles of clothing into an empty washing machine and turned it on. "What are you so worried about?"

Running Hot and Cold

NOTE: At the moment of writing, the little bugger is 100% breastfed, which has a certain mitigating effect on the condition and odor of the waste product.

I did a lot of reading about what would get diapers clean. I read about rinsing in the toilet, I read about a hot rinse in the washer, then a full cycle of hot wash, hot rinse, I read some stuff about vinegar and Borax and other hippie-type cleaning agents.

Here's what I did.

First, I washed with hot, rinsed with hot. I used 7th Generation laundry soap. I read complaints somewhere about residue and reduced absorption, but I haven't seen it. I added 1 cup of vinegar to the wash cycle, and another cup into the fabric softener cup. I read about adding vinegar in the rinse to remove odors, and I was doing that with regular laundry anyway.

I thought what a drag to have to go down there and figure out when it was rinsing, so I studied the mechanism in the softener dispenser and discovered that it only came out during spin cycles, which would work fine.

I also added about 1/4 of Borax to the wash. Borax is bauxite. It's mined. It's not man-made, so the hippies dig it, but it's still not good to eat or put in your eye. Bauxite undergoes a mild reaction in water and generates some H2O2 - hydrogen peroxide - which is a very mild bleaching agent. Bauxite also has a tendency to leave behind some alkaloids in the fabric, which cause rash pretty effectively.

The bauxite, hot water combo makes your diapers pretty stain free - sans chlorine.

I wash the diapers on the "Small" load selection to conserve water.

I dried the diapers on hot. They came out fluffy and soft.

Then I read the British LCA on cloth "nappies" and found that the best way to lower the carbon footprint of your diapers was to hang them dry. Now I do that. They're a little crunchy, but nobody minds.

Then I started washing the diapers in hot and rinsing them in cold. I cut down on the amount of Borax to ease the rash. They still came out really clean and smelled pretty good.

I also tried reducing the wash load to "Extra Small" - but that wasn't enough rinse water to get the soap out of the diapers. Back to "Small."

I then tried cold wash cold rinse. Got rid of the Borax (still with the rash). Now the diapers have noticeably dark stains and a very subtle, but not unpleasant, odor when they come out of the wash. By the time they're dry, the odor is gone and they smell pretty much like nothing.

I don't rinse them at all before putting them in the wash. This may change when we introduce some solids. I'm looking forward to better weather, when the UV rays can bleach and odor-eliminate for me. I hear that works quite well.

A Rose by Any Other Name

How do you keep fish from smelling?

Cut off their noses.

How do you keep your diaper pail from smelling?

You don't. It has poop and pee in it. Keep the lid closed. Wash the contents every other day.

Don't waste your time washing the pail - just try to let it air out after the diapers go in the wash and before a new diaper gets in there. If it gets really gross, I guess you could wash it. I try to drop diapers into it in a way that doesn't spread the contents around.

I've read about the wet and dry methods. They both sound like a hassle.

The Drying Game

I'll write more about general cleaning later. Right now, I'd like to address a radical bit of information - a 2008 study by the UK Environmental Agency. If you go looking for information on the apparent benefit of cloth diapers, you'll find a lot of would-be-greenies shrugging and saying - "well, I guess it's a wash - may as well use disposable."

They actually say that - "it's a wash" - again and again and again. (For shame, Sierra Club). It's like Pampers paid for the slogan to be written.

Some people refer to a 2005 study by the UK EA, but they updated it in 2008. It contains this oft-overlooked nugget:

Combining three of the beneficial scenarios (washing nappies in a fuller load, outdoor line drying all of the time, and reusing nappies on a second child) would lower the global warming impact by 40 per cent from the baseline scenario, or some 200kg of carbon dioxide equivalents over the two and a half years, equal to driving a car approximately 1,000 km.

40% reduction in carbon dioxide. Geez. I guess if you actually try to save energy while using cloth, you might could. Go figure. If you're really into numbers, read this ass-stomping rebuttal dry, factual rebuttal (the link to the good one died...) of the 2005 UK EA study. Maybe that's why they re-did it.

I live in a climate even worse than the UK as far as line-drying clothes goes - so I tried the following experiment: I hung the diapers on a drying rack in the kitchen overnight. It worked fine. The diapers were really stiff and my wife complained - so I now throw them in the dryer on low for 20 minutes first. I could probably get away with 15 minutes.

Now the diapers are softer, and the electric drying time was reduced from 60 minutes to 20 and the temperature from medium to low. And if you think you'll run out of diapers waiting, or need to buy more: I have 24 diapers and I wash them about every other day.

What's really odd to me is that the trumpeters of the British Life Cycle Assessment seem to have hung out to dry any concerns about landfills. Landfills are nasty. They degrade groundwater, they smell, things in them don't biodegrade - contrary to popular opinion (take note biodegradable diaper users: personally, I don't care - just don't be suckered by the packaging).

The discussions about landfill environmental impact are hard to find, because it's just assumed that they are a very bad solution to long-term waste management. My feelings about it go like this: like landfill? Go ahead.

What's at stake is that with cloth, you have choices. You can choose to lower your impact. The decisions you make affect your ecology, your wallet, your shopping habits, and the amount of trash to the curb. If you use disposable, your ability to choose is far more limited.

Up next: A smell just as sweet.

You Can't Stop It - Your Only Hope is to Contain It

Once you get a poopy or pee-y diaper, you have to put it somewhere until you wash it. I use two of these. One is for regular laundry and diaper covers (which get a little poopy, but can be washed with dark colors with no detriment to the laundry). The other is for soiled diapers and the rags I use to wipe baby's butt. (I also don't like wipes - mostly because of the fragrance, but also because of the feel. There's a reason you wash your body with a cotton rag and not a paper towel. Paper, however soft, has never been recommended by anyone to rub on your face. Why use it on baby's butt if you don't have to.) The waste pails have removable plastic liners. I don't use bags. I empty the crappy pail into the wash and sometimes spritz the liner with a little Lysol if it smells really bad. It gets a little damp and funky in there, so I let it air out a little whenever I do the diapers. The pails are about 3 gallons, which is enough to run a small batch of diapers about every other day - which is about as long as you can let that gross stuff hang out in there. There are some opinions about "wet storage" which involves soaking all the stuff in water - but that just sounds nasty - plus you have this 3-5 gallon bucket of water to deal with. The proviso at the moment is that my kid is about 11 weeks old and exclusively breastfed, which makes his poops a lot more manageable than solid food or formula poops. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. You can get a Diaper Genie, but the product has been designed like Gillette razors and consumer-grade vacuums to force you to perpetually purchase disposable, refillable, replaceable bits and pieces on a regular basis. And when you're done with babies, you have a nasty old Diaper Genie. When I'm done with babies, I have two great wastepaper baskets. I'm trying to tackle things in the order they come - but I feel compelled to deal with a part of the Big Carbon Footprint issue - so: up next...The Drying Game!

No Job too Small, No Cover too Small

Ask my wife: it can take me an hour to work myself up to buying a cleaning product, only to put it back on the shelf before leaving the store. Like Yossarian, I'm convinced that they're all out to kill me (think about it for a second, and you'll notice it's true) - and on top of that, I don't really enjoy spending money.

I didn't have time to get around to ordering any cloth diaper stuff before the baby was born, so the boy was in disposables when we took him home. Left on my own, it would have probably taken me an eye-bulging month on the internet to buy anything to put the poop in.

Luckily for me, I have great friends. The kick-ass folks at Dogwood Bread Company pitched in and bought me my first cloth diapering rig (you'll see these referred to elsewhere as your "stash". Not sure where these cats grew up, but around my house as a kid your "stash" was small green and smelly and generally kept in your sock drawer.)

The diapering gear was shipped to our house and got there maybe a week after the boy. We got 6 Thirsties Duo diaper covers (made in USA), 24 pre-fold organic cotton unbleached small diapers, and 12 big ones. They came from punkinbutt.com.

We also got a wicked-cool object called a Snappi - which was really fun, until I figured out a better way to use the covers and diapers without it. The Snappi is still pretty fun - I used it to put a diaper on the cat.

The boy was born 6lbs 5oz, and by the time we got home from the hospital, he was 6lbs. He is what they call a "banana baby" - meaning long and lean. He's also breastfed, which keeps him pretty lean as he grows. The Thirsties Duo cover has a pretty nifty system for adjusting the size, so you can technically use one set until about 9 months and another until potty training. (By-the-by - I hate measuring babies by age. Who's stupid idea is that? Measure them by weight.)

Unfortunately for us, the banana boy's spindly legs weren't fat enough to fill up the inner gusset in the cover - which is the levy for the whole system - no gusset, no containment.

So, we used the disposables until he was four weeks old, and then the covers fit. We had to buy one more full box of the disposables before we got into the cloth. Could we have figured out a way to do cloth the whole time? Probably.

But, you know, I was really damn tired, and my wife was sore, and we had no general idea what the hell we were doing. Give yourself a break every now and then. You're going to make up the difference in the long haul.

Up Next: Containment!

Early Guest

Our son was born two weeks before the due date. He was also 6lbs by the time we got him home.

I figured I had those two weeks to finish my research and shopping for cloth diapers and covers. I didn't. The hospital used Pampers Swaddlers - Size N - on the baby. They worked great, and fit well, but I really detested the baby powder smell, and the reactionary types tell me that phthalates are a no-no.

Disposables are also supposed to give baby more diaper rash. Didn't seem to on this kid until later.

Not surprisingly, the baby survived. Also, the hospital lets you loot the postpartum room, so we made off with enough diapers for a couple weeks, which was great because we didn't have any at home when my wife went into labor.

One of those packets about fills an 8 gallon garbage bag when it's done soaking up baby droppings, though.

Earth: 0. Me: $20 savings.

Next up - cloth diaper covers are too big!!