Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Have we had the wool pulled over our eyes?


Disposable nappies only contribute a small amount to landfill.......so it would seem....


Acording to a leading brand of disposable in New Zealand, the New Zealand Ministry for the Environment suggests that disposable nappies make up around 1.9% of NZ Landfill. On their website, this company compares this figure to that of Plastics and food waste. Obviously when you compare disposable nappies at 1.9% to plastics at 9.1% as shown in the graph above, this all sounds like it is nothing at all to worry about because nappies are only contributing 1.9% of all landfill waste after all.


However when I did the maths I was truely shocked. When you stop to consider that only about 4%* of our entire population** contributes one single product (disposable nappies) to landfill and that this one single product contributes a whopping 1.9% all on its own this figure is actually shocking! Think of every plastic procuct that could possibly end up in our landfill, the list would be almost endless yet all of these plastic products only contribute to 9.1% of landfill and 100% of the population would contribute to at least some of this plastic waste.

Then when you consider that disposable nappies are solely responsible for nearly 2% of landfill waste and only 4% of the entire population uses them, these figures actually started to make me think that we may have a serious nappy waste issue.

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