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The end of Disposables?


Elfy

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Gove hints that non-biodegradable disposable nappies could be banned

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Disposables arent going anywhere, Not while more than possibly 70% of the world doesnt have a way to clean cloth diapers at home(lack of home clothes washing machines)(for hand washing, lack of hanging to dry spaces)

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What you might see is restrictions put on them, such as being used only in hospitals, day-care and nursing homes where they can be professionally used end to end

Most of the disposable market is for babies and that is where they are used more carelessly

If they put a tax on them, it will be of such a magnitude that will make them economically unfeasible, like with smokes. The support for this can be ginned up with NIMBY for landfill expansion and they could make the landfill requirements so high as to be very expensive since they are dealing with lingering nightsoil and other toxins for decades to come

Pampers were a product of the long-term 1950's-60's prosperity. The previous generation used to grouse about how wasteful they are; "one shit and you throw it away?!? I didn't raise you to be such a waster", and that "you're leaving your shit around for someone else to take care of. I didn't raise you to be a pig"

5 minutes ago, barnburner said:

Disposables arent going anywhere, Not while more than possibly 70% of the world doesnt have a way to clean cloth diapers at home(lack of home clothes washing machines)(for hand washing, lack of hanging to dry spaces)

What did they do before throw-aways came around? which was most of human history? At least they can wash cloth in the river. Do you think they will have the education and knowledge to isolate thr throw-aways or will they just leave them hanging around? and just what will THAT lead to?

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A lot can happen, so I'd take a wait and see approach.  Even if a hypothetical ban did come to pass, it might not be permanent.  Bans can be lifted.  Like with the American Prohibition.   Now I'm getting amusing mental images of diaper riots and baby diapers on the black market. ?

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I beg to differ: I think it is a big issue.  There's a lot of coverage about plastic pollution over here on television and in the press, and there's no doubt it's a very serious prolem that can only get worse.  That's the reason I now wear washables whenever I can.  Much as it sticks in my throat to say so, I think Michael Gove is right about this.  If I know the UK Conservative Party, their approach will be very much trying to get the manufacturers to use fully biodegradable materials, and will probably be pretty ineffective.  In any case, to make that work is bound to need research & won't happen quickly.  It will also need pressure from more than just the UK, and the EU could also go the same way, despite the UK withdrawal from the EU.  I'd be surprised if they put significant taxes on disposable nappies for real babies - it would make them too unpopular with the electorate.

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What will happen if they ban them is people will be smuggling them in.  To get rid of them, people will bury them in their own back yards, forests, empty fields or even try and burn them in huge furnaces or incinerators.  It will be like prohibition in the 1920's in America.  If we can burn old rubber tires for fuel in industries, why can't we seperate all the disposable diapers and burn them for fuel as well?  Or incinerate them?  People have used dried cow chips (poop) for burning out west for years as fuel where trees are not all that plentiful.  Think about it.  30 years ago no one recycled.  Now you have just about everyone recycling.  If government and society can come up with good ways to collect and recycle glass, tin and paper, they should (if they even want to bother and try) be able to come up with a way to use disposable diapers as a benefit rather than having them decompose in landfills.  It's just laziness and lack of incentive on the part of governments.  So much easier to just ban them than it is to find a better, cleaner way to dispose of them.  Just like anything these days.  Throw out your flat screen TV and just get a new one rather than fixing what broke.  We live in a disposable society where we would rather throw away and replace instead of fixing what we have.  That's why it's so hard to believe someone wants to ban an every day product  like disposable diapers.  I agree they do fill landfills and don't decompose, but the same can be said for all other plastics that people throw away.  If we can recycle other paper and plastics, we should be able to find a way to do so with used diapers, even if that means the users have to have a special trash bin just for diapers (no different than special bins for recycling plastic, paper and glass), and have those bins go to incinerators or for burning for industrial fuel, just like old rubber tires.

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1 hour ago, rusty pins said:

If we can recycle other paper and plastics, we should be able to find a way to do so with used diapers

Absolutely agree with you Rusty.  The manufacturers need incentives to work out how to do it though, & that will be led from the baby market first, with ABs coming later.  Governments need to provide the incentives.  If manufacturers had to pay for the safe disposal of their nappies guaranteeing they couldn't cause problems for future generations they'd be putting the investment in already.

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They'd better figure out how to replace all the jobs lost when they ban all this stuff.  The middle class is already shrinking at an alarming rate and if you factor in automation the future for the middle class kinda looks bleak.  UBI might be a solution but I believe that will remove ambition and make people too dependent on their respective Governments.....which is a bad thing IMO....

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26 minutes ago, drynot said:

They'd better figure out how to replace all the jobs lost when they ban all this stuff.  

I have my doubts about jobs lost due to banning paper diapers. Most of those are made outside the US, so very few jobs will be lost from manufacturing. Most retail stores also sell other things as well (food, toys, etc.), so no jobs lost there, and the same could be said for transportation. What you would see is an increase in cloth diaper services, as they would have to serve small rural & suburban areas, not just the big cities like we now see.

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23 hours ago, Little Christine said:

 

What did they do before throw-aways came around? which was most of human history? At least they can wash cloth in the river. Do you think they will have the education and knowledge to isolate thr throw-aways or will they just leave them hanging around? and just what will THAT lead to?

Thinks may have changed drastically in the last 100 or so years with the advent on home washing machines, But its possible that todays young parents will likely "Have no time" to hand wash diapers if they dont have any laundry machines, Many of todays young people also rely on having to do their laundry at their parents and this could be an up to a twice a month type of thing which would mean diapers sitting in a hamper for up to 2 weeks before they can be cleaned, Dont forget about apartment dwellers who have to pay to do laundry if their buildings have machines, For myself, Im up to twice a month in that part. Then there are the ones who think they can save a dollar by taking them to a laundromat, possibly on a bus. There is a chance home delivery diaper cleaning services could make a comeback.

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16 hours ago, barnburner said:

Thinks may have changed drastically in the last 100 or so years with the advent on home washing machines, But its possible that todays young parents will likely "Have no time" to hand wash diapers if they dont have any laundry machines, Many of todays young people also rely on having to do their laundry at their parents and this could be an up to a twice a month type of thing which would mean diapers sitting in a hamper for up to 2 weeks before they can be cleaned, Dont forget about apartment dwellers who have to pay to do laundry if their buildings have machines, For myself, Im up to twice a month in that part. Then there are the ones who think they can save a dollar by taking them to a laundromat, possibly on a bus. There is a chance home delivery diaper cleaning services could make a comeback.

From the figure that was given "70%" not being able to clean clothe diapers. I think the post was about 3rd World areas. Human settlements tned to be along rivers and around lakes

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They can start by stopping the use of landfills and recycle what can be recycled and burn what can be burned

In Norway everything get recycled or burned and the burn heat get sent to houses nearby for heating

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It is a simple thing to stop the use of disposable diapers for babies all the government needs to do is sterilelize every new born child and in a matter of a few years ( 4 to 5 at most) there will be no need for disposable baby diapers. 

On the other spectrum of life, all those adults living in old age homes that wear diapers, well stop giving them life supporting meds and soon they will be gone also, thusly reducing the need for adult diapers. 

Now that leaves the rest of us who wear diapers because we enjoy doing so, so let’s make adult diapers better, say a diaper that can hold up for 24 hours before needing to be removed with auto locking divices to prevent early removal. 

Problem solved, or made worst ? It’s all in how you look at it. 

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Hummm, auto locks sounds interesting.  Considering that we already have waterproof pants available with locks, not a large jump to see locks that once set can't be removed for 24 hrs.

As far as garbage burners go, we in  Mpls area already have most of our garbage that is not recycled going to the burners, so that is happening.  They say that the energy generated is going to electricity, but don't say how efficient that is IE How much natural gas is used to burn this stuff vs how much power is generated above the amount of gas needed to burn the trash compared to simply generating power using gas alone.

End of the day, doubt that disposable diapers will be going away any time soon!

 

 

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Actually, from looking into the Baltimore plant, it is a net win, but it takes a lot of garbage to make power if that's what you mean by "efficiency."   Baltimore had  a hard time keeping the garbage coming fast enough.   Of course, you still have to deal with the unburnable stuff and you are releasing a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.

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Diapers can be recycled now, but the economics of doing it aren't there. And TBH it's a small problem compared to electronic waste and the huge lack of recycling in general. Plus landfills aren't good for non-intended purposes and every one of them will come back to haunt us at some point. 90+% of the parents will cast their next vote against any politician who votes to ban disposables; people will have their convenience as long as that doesn't affect them directly in a big way. And growing the cotton for cloth diapers involves just as much harm to the environment, so all a ban will do is harm us in other ways. Plus the increased cotton demand will cause lands now used to grow foodstuffs to switch over to growing cotton or other materials, exacerbating the issues we have there. Quite simply, there is no easy and workable solution to any of the larger problems we have in the world today. 

Bettypooh

Meant to say this too- Governments are the last place to look for solutions as they are all screwed up to some degree. Where I live we had a halfway decent recycling system coinciding with regular trash pick-up. It was limited in scope but a fair number of people used it since it didn't cost anything extra. So in their infinite wisdom, the local government decided to try to make it into something that generates cash for them. Now you have to pay to recycle, starting with renting a special bin which they had to pay to have made instead of continuing to use the ones we already had, so now very few people here recycle. Of course the government will try to hide their mistake and it's costs and with all the other issues we have nobody is going to call them out on this.

The only path to a better world is to make it yourself.

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5 hours ago, Dubious said:

They can start by stopping the use of landfills and recycle what can be recycled and burn what can be burned

In Norway everything get recycled or burned and the burn heat get sent to houses nearby for heating

What I said!

I saw many years ago an episode of Dirty Jobs where he was helping recycle old tires from dumps and wherever people tossed them out.  Many were retredded and resold, the ones that were too far gone were ground up.  When ground up really small the rubber bits were used for high school athletic  running tracks, and the others were burned by a company, not to provide electricity for the nearby city, but to burn for power for their own manufacturing plant.  There has to be a better way of disposing of diapers and I think incinerating them for power or heat is not a far fetched idea.  I just think people would scream bloody murder if they had to seperate all their used baby diapers into a special bin for pick up and disposal.  How would it work when out somewhere and they had to change their kid?  Would every restroom have a diaper recycle bin just like they have a baby changing table?  Would there be a special recycle truck to pick up just the diapers?  Would someone have to sort them to make sure no one put glass or metal in the bin like they do now with other recycled items?  It's doable but you will always have the smart ass who tries to sneak other stuff in with the diapers and recycled stuff just to try and be stupid.  They pick up and sort recycled stuff now in different trucks from the regular trash trucks, what would be the difference in having a special colored bin or bag for disposable diapers only?  When picked up with the other recyclables, just have a different section of the truck for them to go in.  Some parents will still throw used diapers in the trash, just like some people still throw cans, paper and bottles in the trash, but even if some won't recycle used diapers, all the others that do will keep a lot of it that goes into landfills now out of them.

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The bulk of the disbosable market is baby diapers. The ABDL market is nearly infinitesimal

There are many things that are not on the open market so throw-aways could go on a restricted market

Recyling is easier said than done. There is a big difference between "doable" and "practical". This is espeically true when "Who wants to take someone else's shit"; or pay for it?

For those not in the know P&T made their name by showing and explaining how "magic" tricks were done https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=penn+%26+teller+recycling+ They were then picked up by HBO to host programs debunking things such as Alcoholics Anonymous and "Alternative" medicine and just grew from there

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I don't believe that something like that will coming soon (at last in germany). Actually there are some litte projects here, where diapers are used in combination with block heat power plants because the have a pretty high calorific value - how ever this is still somehow experimetal. The problem is that you need relativ high temperatures to burn also the dioxin what arise while burning with to low temperatures. That's what people called "energy recycling" and that's what they do also with other waste that is not really recyclable. I'm not really a friend of this, but it's a beginning and most likely better then dumping it in landfills. I also read also about projects where they try to extract the SAP and reused it to ameliorate the soil in areas with low precipitation.

How ever for the moment I think it's impossible to produce a real bio degradable diapers because of the SAP. But that is exactly that what make disposables that much more effective compared to cloth diapers. So as long there is no real alternativ there's most likely also no bann...

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I'll point out something I found out last night though apparently happened right after the Government made that speech.

Michael Gove, the Environmental Minister, tweeted out a clarification that said they certainly weren't going to ban disposable diapers but would look at other ways of reducing their impact on the environment.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/michael-gove-denies-nappy-ban_uk_5bb3d17de4b01470d04c74ba

To say their environmental impact is negligible though is just wrong. According to the article above which cites a different source 8 million disposable nappies are thrown away every day... That's a huge number for a small island, factor in every other country and you end up with a huge sum. It seems like rather than banning them they would prefer to find a way to harness them for energy or something which I'm all for.

Also, regarding recycling, a lot of things can't be recycled if they are in any way dirty. A letter was circulated through our building fairly recently telling us not to put anything that hadn't been cleaned in the recycling. Old pizza boxes for instance shouldn't be recycled because of the grease. I'm not sure how you would ever make used nappies available for recycling, as much as I hope they can it seems like that is still a long way away.

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a few cities in Norway collect food waste and diapers are to be put in that waste and then it get composted 

Has to be put in biobags before throwing out or it would just be a big mess..

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