Responsible Waste Management

The world is conspiring against us, but all we are trying to do is do the world a favour. I’m talking about nappies. We have been using disposable nappies, for nearly three months now, and the baby gets through them as if they are going out of fashion. And they are going out of fashion, at least in the little West End bubble we occupy.

Long ago, in that hazy distant past before the baby was born, which was in fact less than three months ago, we bought a starter pack of reusable nappies. There are many different types to choose from, old-skool flannel sheets that need to be folded like a fajita and pinned into place to more hi-tech varieties, but the ones we plumped for were Bambino Mios, because they were going cheap on Ebay.

We contemplated a future of rinsing poo from off-white bits of cloth and having freshly washed nappies hanging from every radiator in the flat like so many other smugly ethical West Enders that have gone before. But then fate lent a hand. As we reached the end of our original supply of disposable nappies and we were gearing ourselves up for the Bambinos, our pipes froze. Obviously you can’t reuse reusable nappies with no hot water to wash them in. So we bought more disposable nappies. We will try again when these run out, we thought.

Now our washing machine has packed in. It can be fixed, it just needs a new dial, but for the time being I am taking our stuff to the launderette. I don’t think the old dears in their would take kindly to me shoving their machines full of shitey bits of cloth, they have already seen fit to pass comment on the length of my shoelaces and my ignorance of the spin dryer. So we have bought more disposable nappies.

I reckon the baby needs to be changed about five or six times a day, sometimes more. That means we use nearly hundred nappies every two weeks. That is a lot of landfill and it is a small Scotland. We are already perilously close to being submerged in garbage as it is without adding several tonnes of dirty nappies to the pile.

Reducing waste and recycling seem to be on the back burner of environmental concerns right now, eclipsed by the huge 'debate' over carbon emissions and global warming in general, but it is the issue closest to my heart. I have always been annoyed by the wilful wasting of resources. Take the crap plastic toys you get in cereal boxes. They are made in their thousands using our ever-dwindling supply of hydrocarbons and they are so absolutely fucking useless that it makes me angry. I challenge anyone to provide an example of a child having fun with a toy out of their cornflakes. I don’t believe it has ever happened.

The compromise we have reached is to use Nature’s Path biodegradable nappies. They are fully compostable, apparently, but just who would want to mess about with them in such a way is beyond me. They sell them in the Boots round the corner so it is handy and they are not that expensive. They are certainly better than the Boots own brand; we have a whole pack of them that we shoved in the cupboard in disgust. The only one we ever put on the baby disintegrated on contact with her poo and we never used them again. Maybe we should just throw them out.