Now, I feel sick seeing trees covered in a thin film of plastic bags. Bags don’t stay in a landfill. Through gradual diffusion, they are spreading out across the land and the sea. We’re suffocating ourselves.
That it has to come to such a state before there is outcry all around the world is sad, but at least there is a building outcry now. The Guardian has collected all of their waste stories from one page.
Today is No Plastic Day, to bring awareness to disposable plastic goods like bottles and bags. It’s time all of the plastic pollution warriors out there added plastic diapers to their list of nasty polluters and toxic waste issues.
Let’s make every day No Plastic Diapers Day. There are perfectly good reusable products that do a better job of catching baby waste.
Washington, DC, taxes plastic shopping bags, and use goes down by 83% in one month. “Geez, that was simple,” wrote CommonDreams.org.
The tax, one of the first of its kind in the nation, is designed to change consumer behavior and limit pollution in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. ~Tim Craig, Washington Post
Funds raised from the tax were lower than expected, but that was because the overall program worked so well so quickly.
It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to apply this a similar incentive to reduce waste from disposable diapers.
In the past year since the No Impact Man movie and book came out, Colin Beavan has turned No Impact into a movement through No Impact Project.
One of the Project’s programs is No Impact Week, a guided, week-long experiment to explore no-impact living. The idea is that we try the experiment and ask ourselves questions about our stuff. Short time makes it bounded and doable. Little pain. Time to explore.
The most ridiculous, wasteful consumer products ever? How about throwaway underwear? We need to step back and ask questions about the products we allow into our homes and our consciousness.
What a Waste to throw away 10s of billions of disposable diapers every year when reusable diapers will do a better job for less money. Our culture has begun to let go of throwaway drink bottles and throwaway plastic bags in favor of reusable bottles and reusable bags. We can’t keep buying products knowing that we will be throwing them away after only a short period of use.
Disposable products create waste, whether that waste is sent to a landfill for 1000 years, flushed and disposed of through wastewater treatment, or composted and disposed of as yard waste.
Reusable products do not create waste.
Cloth diapers use fewer resources in their manufacture, distribution, use, and disposal. As more people become aware of the need to reduce, reuse, and recycle, it is time to make the switch back to 100% reusable cloth diapers.
Have you seen the 20-minute presentation of The Story of Stuff? This is an incredibly concise introduction to Extractions > Production > Distribution > Consumption > Disposal, with a focus on eliminating waste by choosing another way: sustainability.
Looking at comments on the Story of Stuff, a lot of people say, “Yea? But where are the references.” References abound throughout the Story of Stuff website, but now we have a collection of references printed on garbage because The Story of Stuff the book was just released. Haven’t read it yet, but I’ll post a review once I do.
What a Waste is a project of Real Diaper Association (RDA). Its intent is to bring together the individuals and organizations---be they nonprofit or for-profit---who endorse and support the choice of reusable cloth diapers as a powerful way to reduce waste.
Together, we will compile
and publish research and news highlighting efforts to reject throwaway thinking and to promote the use of reusable products, particularly cloth diapers.
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