Diapers That Don't Soil the Earth

There are lots of reasons a person's best efforts to minimize consumption, shop responsibly and live in an eco-friendly way are thwarted once a baby comes along.

Chief among them: diapers.

A baby can easily go through 5,000 to 6,000 diapers in the two to three years that they wear them. Bearing that in mind, most parents I know would prefer to avoid clogging landfills with diapers from big companies like Procter & GamblePG and Kimberly-ClarkKMB, with their plastic shells, super-absorbent gels and overwhelmingly fake "baby powder" scents.

There are several eco brands of disposable and quasi-disposable diapers these days and they work pretty well. You can buy them at Diapers.com, Drugstore.com, Target TGT and even Wal-MartWMT for roughly the same price as their mainstream counterparts. But they all have their quirks -- and I'm not sure they benefit the environment nearly as much as they assuage green guilt.

The environmental problems with diapers go from end to end. There's the petroleum, bleach and other chemicals used to manufacture and ship them, and there's the utter lack of biodegradability once you throw them away.

One new brand, Nature Babycare from Sweden, claims to address both issues. Its shell is theoretically compostable because it's made from corn instead of plastic, and the absorbent lining is mostly compostable because it's chlorine free and partly made from wood pulp. Getting petroleum-based plastic and dioxin-generating chlorine out of the manufacturing process is a worthy start.

But one look at these nappies tells you that they are not going to break down in a backyard compost pile anywhere nearly as quickly as your baby will go through them. (And not everything that comes out of a baby's bottom should wind up in a compost pile anyway.) You could find out whether your town has a drop-off location for organic waste (essentially a community compost pile), but most don't.

So you'll probably do with these diapers what I did. You'll wrap them up in a plastic garbage bag that is absolutely not biodegradable and put them out by the curb to be collected by your town garbage collectors, who will ultimately pile them into a landfill. Once there, it seems they wouldn't break down even if they were made of fig leaves, according to the California Integrated Waste Management Board.

Seventh Generation and Tender Care, which is made by the Hain-Celestial GroupHAIN, are also chlorine free, but both contain the same superabsorbent polymers that the big brands do. Surprisingly, the environmental community hasn't really skewered these gels, which hold many times their weight in liquid (you can see how they work on this YouTube video). Some warn that the gel could irritate a baby's skin and others caution that if a diaper rips open a child might try to eat the dessicant. But these are not concerns that will keep most parents up at night.

It would seem that Seventh Generation is also trying to be eco-friendly by cutting down on materials. Its paper-bag brown diapers are the skimpiest ones I've ever seen. My daughter outgrows them long before she hits the weight limit that the packaging suggests.

If you are gel-wary, another Hain-Celestial brand, Tushies, is the only one that eschews it and blends the wood pulp filling with cotton instead. These diapers make up for their lack of chemical technology by being the biggest diapers I've ever seen. They work surprisingly well, but if you want a streamlined look under your child's onesie, this is not the brand for you.