I heard a statistic the other day that pulled me up short. Every day in the United States, 50 million disposable diapers are sent to landfills. Life expectancy for those diapers is 500 years.
When I heard those numbers my first reaction was, wow, that’s a lot of dirty diapers going in the ground, and that can’t be good. And, in fact, it isn’t. Not only do they take forever to decompose, they introduce bacteria and viruses that could threaten groundwater. Conclusion: disposable diapers are bad for the environment and their consumption should be discouraged.
But wait. Take a single mother living in an apartment with no laundry facilities. Is it realistic to expect her to save her child’s soiled cloth diapers and cart them to a laundromat? Is it even ethical given that the diapers present a potential hazard to other users of the facility? Besides which, what about all the water it takes to wash all those diapers? If you’re living in parched areas of the Southwest, laundry is a significant variable in water conservation. Add to that the hardship cloth diapers present in terms of time and effort and suddenly disposable diapers seem like a great idea.
Changing the way we live to make less of an imprint on the planet is seldom a black-and-white, up-or-down decision. Sure, there are things yet to be done that would require little sacrifice, and simply educating people about those would help. But long-term, we need to do more than give up plastic bags at the grocery store. And if conservation requires an amalgam of inconvenient, expensive, laborious and unappealing practices, I don’t like our chances. Good intentions and human nature regularly collide. Human nature usually emerges without a scratch.
So it’s encouraging to read about the efforts of Pam Matson, a scientist who views protecting the environment as a complex exercise involving not only land, air and water, but also humans. Humans who must eat and work and support families and rid themselves of baby waste, for example.
People matter. And because Matson and her colleagues at Stanford recognize this, their research promotes true sustainability, not a pie-in-the-sky vision that only works for the most privileged—and therefore least needy—sectors of societies.
Pam Matson works on agriculture, not diaper disposal. But the message in her work rings the same bell: we’re all in this thing together, and we had better find solutions that make sense for all of us, not some of us.
