By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

You had to see it coming, didn't you? How else to follow up on a story about the amazing power potential of pee, than with one about poo? And I don't mean as in Winnie the. Granted I may have thrown you a curveball with my hint at the end of last week's dispatch, “Next time: methane.” But this is but a feint, a side step, in truth, because methane is very much a byproduct of waste, human and animal and otherwise. It too is a very useful energy source and could be competitive with natural gas, and maybe, for the same reasons alluded to last week, it isn't going to go away any time soon, given its source (we, the human race, all our crap in all senses and forms, plus all that of our domestic mega-herds). The average American landfill repository of all that junk we consumers toss, just oozes with methane. Like at that cool dinosaur fossil pit in L.A., it is literally bubbling out of the ground. And it burns just like gas, natural or otherwise.

There is a direct connection, however, between human solid waste matter, pee's natural counterpart, if you will (or even if you won't, or sometimes can't), and methane: disposable diapers. According to the National Diaper Service (Yes Virginia, there is such an agency) the average baby uses from 6 to 10,000 diapers before being officially declared as potty-trained. And yes, a lot of that does turn into methane in all those landfills (some of which some of you may be living on top of—a not so beneficial form of land recycling that has been around since before Love Canal). Thus it will end up in our atmospheres (both personal and public) instead of our gas tanks because, well, we let it.

Now, getting back to those diapers. In the USA, 95 percent of all diaper changes are disposable diapers, and most of them end up in landfills, according to John A. Shiffert, executive director of the National Association of Diaper Services. Given that as of 2006, the last year statistics are available, 4,266,000 babies were born in the USA. That comes to 405.27 billion (that's billion, folks) dirty diapers getting thrown away and dumped into landfills, just in the USA alone. Way to go, consumers! Of course, statistics tend to be unreliable, and often wildly conflicting. According to the American Petroleum Institute, 3.5 billion gallons of oil and 250,000 trees are used to produce just 18 billion throwaway diapers used in the US each year. Either way it's a lot. Huge volumes of wood are pulped (using an enormous amount of water) and then commonly bleached white with chlorine, a process that produces dioxin, one of the most toxic substances ever made by humans.

Once in the landfill, diaper waste has the potential to pollute local groundwater and the diaper itself has little chance of ever decomposing. When your baby’s great, great, great, great grandchildren come into the world, those diapers will still be lying in the landfill (EcoCycle). The EPA was ordered to stop looking into these matters back in 1998, even before Bush, and thus all figures are hopelessly outdated. But as of then, disposable diapers made up 3.4 million tons of waste, or 2.1 percent of U.S. Garbage sitting in landfills. And those diapers don't decompose. They'll just sit there as long as those dinosaur bones, seeping poison. Dioxin comes to mind. We've found creative uses for animal fecal matter, like recycled paper or valuable fertilizer for lawns and gardens, so why can't we find a more productive way to keep all this organic waste from spending an eternity underground? Well, finally the good news. Now two upstart UK companies, Versus Energy and Knowaste, are putting all this basic (as in, really basic) common sense to good, and perhaps even profitable, use. These two companies are forming a partnership (dare we call it a marriage?) to create Britain's very first disposable diaper plant which will get 100 percent of its power from the organic materials in disposable diapers. But according to CleanTechnica, only 2 percent of a used disposable diaper is comprised of organic waste, so what happens to the other 98 percent? Pretty soon we'll all be sitting on top of it, I suppose. Literally.

Sources:

Care2.com

Poo Power: Used Diapers Will Fuel U.K. Recycling Plant, by Beth B.

The Poop on Eco-Friendly Diapers, Elisa Batista, Wired Magazine, 4/27/04

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.