You may have heard of oyster mushrooms being used to break down the cellulose in disposable diapers reducing their time in the landfill from about five hundred years to about four months. While we can all agree that this is a huge advance in dealing with the waste that has already been accumulated from disposable diaper use, we should not disillusion ourselves into thinking that we can give up any eco-guilt about using throw away diapers because these magical biodegrading mushrooms are here to save the day.
An important thing to take into account is natural resources. While disposable products that are more easily biodegradable are a better option than disposable products that take hundreds of years to decompose, they are not better than or equal to a reusable version of that product. We need to take into account the natural resources required to produce these products. With cloth diapers, you purchase them once and you reuse, reuse, reuse. You use a lot less resources compared to the resources that are required to manufacture and distribute disposable diapers that you will use, throw away, use more resources to manufacture and distribute and so on. We live on a finite planet with limited resources so any way that we can cut down on the amount of resources we use for things we need, the better for the health of our planet.
We have ingredients like wood pulp (poor trees!), plastic, toxic chemicals, water, etc. required to produce disposable diapers, in addition to the oil required to transport them. Did you know that more water is used to manufacture disposable diapers than is used to wash cloth diapers? According to the New Parents Guide, " It takes around 80,000 pounds of plastic and over 200,000 trees a year to manufacture the disposable diapers for American babies alone" 18 billion disposable diapers are thrown away each year. I hope those mushrooms are ready to work hard!
Let's talk about poop. As a cloth diapering parent, I can assure you that my baby's waste ends up in the sewage system where it belongs. I always shake the poo into the toilet before the diapers get washed and I spray them over the toilet if necessary. Parents using disposable diapers are supposed to be doing the same, but I've never met anyone who flushes the poo before tossing a disposable diaper in the trash. Have you?
The chemicals in disposable diapers that make them absorbent aren't good for babies and they aren't good for the planet. When sposie's are thrown away, they leach their toxic cocktail of urine, feces, plastic (b.p.a., p.v.c., and phthalates), dioxin, etc. which contaminates ground water all before oyster mushrooms can have a chance to do their work breaking them down.
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