It makes me feel a little bad that about three billion disposable diapers are thrown away every year just in the UK. Not three million. 300 million. If you do the math, that number usually comes up with a different answer: about eight million nappies are thrown away every day, and each one will end up in a landfill or an incinerator, where it will sit, silently and stubbornly, for up to three hundred years.
The Swedish OMEP, which is part of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, said this was not okay. Aside from that, they chose the nursery as the best place to start fixing it, not the recycling center or the parliament.
As it became known, the Nappy-Free Children Campaign made a claim that seemed very simple: kids are staying in diapers for a lot longer than they need to, and that’s bad for the environment and for their development. A few decades ago, most kids in the West were no longer wearing diapers by the time they were two years old. In the UK today, the average age at which a child is toilet trained is closer to three. Most kids are trained by eighteen months in developing countries where disposable diapers are still hard to come by. Experts say that the gap has nothing to do with the body. It has to do with culture, not biology.
Swedish OMEP pushed that point home hard. The campaign used research and ideas about early childhood to say that kids who were raised with cloth diapers or who were trained earlier were more aware of their bodies. Childcare workers who use reusable diapers have seen kids as young as twenty months start to use the bathroom on their own, which doesn’t happen very often in places where disposable diapers are used. It’s not hard to understand why: disposable diapers are so good at hiding wetness that kids never develop the sensation-response loop that makes them want to train. Comfort has turned into a kind of growth ceiling in this case.
Take a moment to think about that. To their credit, diaper companies have admitted there is a problem. Pampers made a line of products that let kids feel what it’s like to be wet, which was strange because they had to undo some of the things that made their main product so appealing in the first place. The fact that there is tension shows how stuck the whole industry is.
Something that really made the Swedish OMEP campaign interesting (and controversial) was that it didn’t just talk about the environment. It wasn’t just about the amount of trash in landfills, though the numbers are shocking: disposable diapers make up about 2% to 3% of all household waste in the UK, or about 400,000 tonnes of material every year. The campaign talked about how kids grow up, how parents raise their kids, working moms, convenience, and how knowledge slowly fades between generations. A grandmother used to tell a new parent, “It’s time to take him out of diapers.” These days, a health visitor tells parents to be patient and wait for their child to show signs that they are ready. Both ways of doing things are wise. It’s up to you to decide if the scales are too far in one direction.
When the backlash did happen, it was both expected and unexpected in different ways. Some parents were offended that their choices were seen as bad for the environment. Others spoke out against what they saw as an attempt to mix pressure for development with environmental issues. When people talk about how parents raise their kids, especially very young kids, it seems like the conversation has an electric charge that bigger policy debates rarely manage to create.
The Swedish OMEP may have done more than anything else to start a conversation that most people would have rather not had. The question of nappies is tricky because it touches on important environmental issues, business concerns, changing social norms, and the very personal aspects of a baby’s first few months. It’s still not clear if the campaign will change behavior or policy in a way that lasts. But it gave a problem a name and a face that had been hiding in plain sight, one dump at a time.
