Paediatricians suggest newborns should be changed 10-12 times a day and older babies about six times, ending with just one being used at night-time.

Assuming an average of seven changes a day over the nappy wearing career of your baby, you will use about 6300 nappies. 6300 nappies for just one baby. Can you imagine how big a pile that is? Now try and imagine 1 million because that’s what we, in New Zealand throw away every day!

One million little packages a day buried or burnt.

No-one knows how long disposables take to decompose in landfill and estimates vary wildly, but reported figures are between 40 and 500 years. A proportion of used disposables are sent to incinerators to cast a cloud over New Zealands "clean green" image.

Disposable?  

Almost a million disposable nappies are thrown away every day just in New Zealand.

That’s a 1/3 of a billion disposable nappies a year!

New Zealanders spend millions to dispose of "disposable" nappies, for each baby will produce 1 tonne of disposable nappies in their nappy career. Ironically it can take up to 500 years for a “disposable” nappy to completely decompose. During which time, it can produce the greenhouse gas methane, and the toxic liquid leachate, that can leak into the soil and local water supplies. Incineration releases carcinogenic dioxins into the atmosphere and can create toxic ash, which then has to go into landfill!

Many people ask us about the environmental impact of using washable nappies. There are of course energy costs involved with manufacturing, washing and if you choose, tumble drying. There are these costs for every garment you buy. Would you wear disposable paper pants or would you prefer to wash cotton reusable pants?  If you decide to use washable nappies for your baby, at the end of her nappy career, you have choices to make about what you would like to do with your nappies. You can do what we did, and put another baby into them. You can sell them or give them away as there is a very big market for pre loved nappies, or you can arrange for them to go to the many charitable organizations that take used washable nappies for distribution in poorer countries. Your final choice would be to simply put your 40 nappies and 20 wraps into landfill.  Now compare this to 6300 disposables. On an environmental issue, its a no brainer!

The disposable nappy problem is now so urgent that many councils are offering cash incentives to encourage parents to use washables nappies. Check out what your local councils are doing.