Facing Cloth Diaper Advocates Face To Face.

Nonwovens article, OCT, 2012
Facing cloth diaper advocates the best way I know: face-to-face.
This week I was invited to present a paper at the advanced plastics seminar in Brazil; the Dow Company in Sao Paulo organized this peculiar event. It was held in a very beautiful building with a first class set-up, so far I was pleasantly surprised. After all four speakers presented their papers, wehad a round table, similar to a workshop, except that the panelists were seated in front of the large audience in a nice template and provided with a professional moderator. I noticed the moderator was a well-known TV news reporter because some people in the audience were requesting her to sign autographs before and after the show. This pretty lady started to address some of my colleagues withsome tough questions, I guess in an effort to create a polemic response and stir the audience, questions like: “plastics take more than 500 years to biodegrade, why do you make them?” Or this other one, “how do you feel about supermarkets promoting the use of reusable bags instead of your plastic bags? How do you feel when your kids tell you that they are ashamed, that other kids make fun of thembecause their father is making plastic bottles or plastic caps?" Of course I heard some very good responses from my colleagues who are experts on plastic, they were good and very professional. Each participant was answering similar questions, as they were getting tougher. Then it was my turn to face the moderator with her question. It is always an exciting time for me to get a totally randomquestion when this has not been pre arranged, in some of the nonwoven forums you are able to know what the moderator will ask you a few hours ahead of time. This time I was totally unprepared. She faces me and asks, “Mr. Richer, I have twins, they are using diapers. I love to take care of the environment and I feel responsible about our planet; as a diaper expert, please tell me a good reason why Ishould switch to disposable diapers instead of using cloth ones?" This more or less was my improvised answer:
It is not my decision; I can only attempt to try to make you rethink about your diapering decision, but at the end it will always be your own personal choice, not even the choice of your baby twins. Let me give you a short overview of your options. Biodegradation has been largelyexaggerated; for sure it is not the ultimate solution. Let me explain. The largest contaminant in the planet today is the raising of the cattle that we use for meat, it contaminates more than all cars combined; the most amazing part is that this is a 100% biodegradable process. On the other hand, few of us are in fact ready to become vegetarians. The meat industry has responded by concentrating allthe animals in tight spaces, like with chicken, pig and even some beef farms, this way they have a better chance to collect the animal wastes and some of the methane gas generated, a very toxic gas, unfortunately at the same time they increase the suffering of all these already stressed animals. This only helps people to be more aware and promotes a vicious circle. In the same way, products thatbiodegrade do not add any value to our planet, instead their internal energy is lost forever, most times also adding methane gas, that is, unless the landfill was fitted with a methane gas recovery system. We all know very few landfills have this option. If you think about this with a futuristic mindset, in a few more years, a landfill site will have more real estate value than most other lands inthis planet. People will have already realized that they can recover not only the energy but also many other products by using the landfills as an industrial source for energy and the recovery of some precious raw materials. The fear that people had that the planet will be full of overfilled landfill sites will never happen. Instead, as technology evolves, all those landfills will be consumed...