I awoke in a sweat last night after a nightmare glimpse of Armageddon. To my surprise, it was not a wasteland of crumbled skyscrapers and rusting armaments, like you see in so many end-of-the-world movies. Instead it was filled as far as the eye could see by smouldering mountains of baby diapers.
I was perhaps influenced by a fascinating week spent in Singapore at the EDANA Nonwoven Personal Care Products Conference. They are the 220 or so companies around the world that make baby diapers, feminine hygiene products, adult incontinence pads and a range of “wipes”. They are led by giants like Proctor & Gamble and Kimberley Clark, and the conference was populated by people who work every day of their lives with “stuff” – stuff we often don’t like to talk about.
And what a lot of stuff. I thought the internet provided us with the world of “big numbers”, but you need look no further than nonwoven personal care products. The world consumed – if “consumed” is the right word – a total of 150 billion baby diapers in 2012, and 31 billion adult diapers. And the market is growing by around 9 billion a year. Add to this about 300 billion “feminine hygiene products”. This is an awesome market.
Here in a single, horribly soiled nutshell, is the very essence of the global consumer sustainability crisis. Unmanaged, it leads to the nightmare that disturbed my sleep last night. Unlike consumer electronics, which can be picked apart and the components and metals reused, soiled baby diapers head to just one of two places: land fill or incinerators. I learned that it is in fact technically possible to recycle the “super-absorbent polymers”, or SAPs, that do such an astonishing job in containing the fruits of our babies’ daily labours, but the idea of recovering them does not easily bear thinking about, and the economics of recycling them doesn’t work. So it is land fill or incinerators.
I have ranted often before about humankind’s ultimately unsustainable obsession with “stuff”, and about how the brilliant minds in marketing departments around the world fan these obsessive flames by spending their time persuading us that our discretionary “wants” are in fact absolute “needs”. But here – in baby diapers or women’s menstrual pads – we tumble into the greyest of grey areas. Are they a “want” or a “need”?
The economics of recycling them doesn’t work. So it is land fill or incinerators
Clearly, for the billions of the world’s poorest, living in India, Africa or the more remote parts of China, they are not used, and could never be afforded. From that point of view, they are clearly a “want”, not a need. If these families earned an extra US$10, they would probably spend it on more urgent needs like food or shoes or medicine.