Thursday, January 04, 2007

Shit happens!


One thing you can guarantee with babies is that they are constantly active at both ends.

A steady stream of dribble trickles from their mouths, with occasional more substantial regurgitations of their last injection of breast milk. While at the other end... well I'll leave that to your imagination.

Thankfully what ends up in their nappies has no significant odour - not until they're weaned at least. And I have to confess I've become rather partial to the smell of the scented nappy disposal bags.

So far so good, but all those nappies present a major environmental problem. According to the Women's Environmental Network, here in the UK we dispose of three billion nappies every year - that's eight million every day. Ninety per cent of these end up in landfill where they can take hundreds of year to degrade and the disposal process is costing local authorities millions of pounds.

I do feel somewhat guilty that we're contributing to this problem by using throwaway, disposable nappies. Then I look at the huge piles of washing we now generate without any terry nappies.

How my mother's generation coped with washing all nappies and baby clothes by hand, I simply can't imagine.

1 comment:

Helena said...

I must agree. How mums managed without the aid of today's labour saving devices I don't know!

Environmental issues were something I really didn't give much thought to when raising my boys but the link is thought provoking.

One thing I do swear by though is the fact that had my daughter been in disposable nappies she would not have toilet trained so quickly! At just under 2 years old she was out of nappies. Granted she was on the potty from 9 months but even so, I'm sure the heavy, sodden, twisted feel of saturated terry towelling must have been a joy to be free of. I felt that perhaps the mega comfortable and flexible manageability of disposable nappies were harder to train from! I'm still all in favour of the easy way out though!