Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 29, 1990 TAG: 9003280295
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KAY BARTLETT ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
And, oh, how it played.
The disposable diaper. In the years since, it has been improved: elasticized legs, gels, super absorbency, the anatomically more efficient his and hers versions.
It has become a $3.5 billion-a-year industry, with 85 percent of America's mothers using them.
But the disposable diaper has become a prime target of angry environmentalists who consider it the very symbol of the ills of a throwaway society. The problem is what to do with it once it has done its job. Throwaway diapers clog up the waste stream.
The way a mother covers her baby's bottom has become a subject of hot debate in statehouses and city halls. It has generated piles of studies, reports and pamphlets. Who would have thought the manufacturers of disposable diapers would have to go to such lengths to defend such a wonder product?
Bills either to ban, restrict or tax disposable diapers are before the legislatures of about a dozen states.
On the other hand, the controversy has breathed new life into the diaper service business, and could prove a boon to corn farmers.
The rub is, although disposable diapers account for only 2 percent of the nation's trash, they will last 500 years in a landfill. One proposed solution is the more-expensive biodegradable diaper, and that's where the corn farmers come in.
Jeanne Wirka, a solid-waste reduction expert with the Environmental Action Foundation, says the disposable diaper is the largest single one-use product for which there is a readily available alternative - cloth diapers.
But the convenience factor is extraordinary. Many day-care centers, for example, will not accept youngsters in cloth diapers.
And if everyone switched to cloth tomorrow, there would be chaos. There are not enough cloth diapers nor cloth-diaper services in the country to accommodate them. In environmentally hip Washington, D.C., 400 people are on the waiting list for the one diaper service in town.
The National Association of Diaper Services, after years of decline, reports a 38 percent increase in business last year and a 13 percent rise the year before. The disposable diaper giants, however, say they see no blip yet on their sales screen.
The debate has produced strange bedfellows. The six most active environmental groups and Procter & Gamble Co. and Kimberly-Clark Corp., the disposable diaper manufacturers who control 75 percent of the market, agree that biodegradable diapers are not the answer.
The environmentalists called for a boycott of degradable diapers in mid-December, saying their use only assuages the conscience of consumers who use them. Biodegradable diapers 3 1 DIAPERS Diapers don't decompose in landfills because there is not enough moisture or oxygen, they say.
Taking an opposing view is the National Association of Corn Growers, based in St. Louis. Cornstarch is used in the degradables and this could open up a market of 150 million to 300 million bushels a year for the nation's corn farmers, spokesman Tim Draeger says.
So far, the only state to enact any legislation has been Nebraska, which passed a law last session requiring the use of biodegradables by 1993. Nebraska, it might be noted, is the nation's third-largest corn producing state, just behind Iowa and Illinois.
Earlier this year in Virginia, the General Assembly called for a legislative study on the environmental impact of disposable diapers. The five-member committee performing the study will look at laws being considered in other states.
Iowa, Ohio, Oregon and Washington are also considering restrictive legislation. And Vermont Gov. Madeleine Kunin recently urged a ban on the sale of disposables.
Draeger argues that if the biodegradable diaper technology was improved, it would mean America would be less dependent on foreign oil.
"We are in the infancy of this technology," he says. "We are at the Model T level. We have to learn to walk before we can run."
Wirka says that's plain silly. The amount of "foreign oil" in diapers is negligible and the so-called degradables also use some.
Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble, with a $1.65 billion slice of the disposable pie - compared to Kimberly-Clark's $840 million - has taken a much higher profile in its fight to keep baby's bottom in Pampers and Luvs, its products.
Although close-mouthed about the money it is spending on the diaper wars, P&G is sponsoring two well-publicized projects, one in Seattle demonstrating that plastic diapers can be recycled, and another in St. Cloud, Minn., showing diapers can be composted. The Seattle project is reputed to be a $500,000 venture.
"If you could throw that kind of money at every segment of the trash problem in America, we wouldn't have a trash problem," says Jeffrey Tryens of the Council for Policy Alternatives, a Washington-based environmental group. "It's just good PR for Procter and Gamble."
Wirka, however, thinks the St. Cloud project may have some merit, although she says, "that recycling project is just bogus."
"Procter & Gamble is in a difficult position. They are always the target here and they are applying their corporate good guy image on something that is economically very dubious. I'm more willing to say that the composting project is a more fruitful use of their resources."
P&G, it should be noted, has been a leader in recycling plastic bottles for its products, selling refills for the same plastic bottle and marketing concentrates in smaller bottles where the consumer just needs to add water. Its soaps are also biodegradable.
Since the diaper wars started making the nightly news shows, politicians have gotten bolder. Tryens says he called a meeting about a year ago, inviting legislators, lobbyists, environmentalists and others concerned about the issue.
"At that time, nobody even considered discussing a statewide ban," he says. "The feeling was that no respectable politician would even propose such legislation and that it just wouldn't fly."
Yet, one year later, the state of Vermont is proposing just such legislation as part of a much larger environmental bill. If passed, no disposable diapers would be sold in Vermont after 1993.
Nancy Alexander of New Haven, Conn., is one who's profiting by it all. She started her own cloth diaper service in January and says clients are flocking to her door.
"I've always wanted to go into my own business, and this just sort of fell into my lap," she says. "What's more is that all of my clients treat me like I'm some kind of a hero."
by CNB