Morning:
13°c
An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
London faces a wave of bus and Tube strikes that could cause chaos for millions of passengers as unions walkout over pay and conditions
More...
The great real nappy myth - they are just as bad for the environment as disposables, admits Minister
Last updated at 09:37am on 03.07.07
The organisation aimed to save 35,000 tons of landfill every year by persuading mothers to use and wash towel nappies
For years it was drilled into parents that disposable nappies were environmentally unsound.
They could show their green credentials, they were told, by jumping back a generation or two and using the washable towelling version.
Those who didn't were made to feel they were putting convenience before the future of the planet.
But after a three-year campaign that has cost taxpayers at least £30million, it has been decided that the two types have the same impact on the environment.
As a result, ministers at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have quietly dropped the lavishly-financed Real Nappy Campaign.
The decision follows a four-year research project which found that the impact of burying disposable nappies in landfill sites was matched by the energy consumed and greenhouse gases generated by washing reusables or transporting them to laundries.
Former waste minister Ben Bradshaw confirmed the end of the nappy campaign in a Commons answer delivered last week.
It went unnoticed in the midst of the new Prime Minister's reshuffle, which saw Mr Bradshaw move to the Health Department.
Mr Bradshaw said: "Reusable nappies may reduce demands on landfill but they still impact on the environment in other ways, such as the water and energy used in washing and drying them."
The Environment Agency report, he said, "concluded that there was no significant difference between any of the environmental impacts of the disposable, home use reusable and commercial laundry systems that were assessed".
He added: "None of the systems studied were more or less environmentally preferable."
The admission brought accusations from opposition MPs and pressure groups that huge sums of money are being wasted under the pretence of improving the environment.
Conservative MP Sir Paul Beresford, a former local government minister who is now part of a Commons Communities Select Committee inquiry into household waste, said: "This seems to have been put out without anybody noticing.
"The main success of the Real Nappy Campaign seems to have been to give those of us who are mildly politically incorrect a tremendous horse-laugh."
Corin Taylor, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: "This farcical waste of taxpayers' money shows how politicians are unable to run anything properly.
"It will only stop when politicians realise that they should never try to manage every aspect of our lives in the first place.
"Unfortunately, the green agenda means that we will see many more examples of this sort of madness."
Most of the spending on "real nappies" has been directed through a quango linked to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs called the Waste and Resources Action Programme.
The nappy campaign formed a major part of WRAP's "waste minimisation" programme, which has soaked up more than £82million over the past three years.
WRAP said that the nappy campaign had cost £2.3million over the three years.
However, this figure appears not to include grants of around £100,000 a time paid by the Treasury to local councils to encourage their own real nappy promotions.
Other published figures show that, in WRAP's own terms, the campaign was a failure.
The organisation aimed to save 35,000 tons of landfill every year by persuading mothers to use and wash towel nappies. In fact, it has saved less than 8,000 tons of landfill a year.
This amounts to less than a twentieth of one per cent of household rubbish sent to landfill each year.
A spokesman for WRAP said: "We do want to cut waste going to landfill. The campaign raised awareness and has helped people to find their own solutions."
Mr Bradshaw delivered a speech to WRAP workers last year in which he said the Environment Agency had found no "strong argument in favour of reusable nappies' and that this was 'anathema to real nappy fans".
He said that in future it might be possible to get rid of nappies by leaving them in garden compost bins.
It is estimated that at least three billion disposable nappies are thrown away every year in the UK, creating a waste mountain which is costing local authorities more than £40million a year to treat.
Reader views (6)
i just think its the fact that the industry for disposables nappies dont want to lose the profit made every year from selling disposables. once again it boils down to money, and not for the planets best intrest. another goverment (chicken) making decision. why cant they just come out and say its just about greed?????
- Ian Palmer, worthing, sussex, uk
The environment agency have now published their new report and it confirms that cloth nappies are better for the environment, provided you don't iron your nappies and wash no hotter than 60 degrees.
This confirms what cloth nappy users have been saying all along, add to that the fact that you're not putting any gels or chemicals next to your baby's skin and you're saving yourself £500 per child, why would you still want to use disposables?!
- Tracy, Plymouth
you can't really say that using cloth nappies is impacting the environment because of the water and energy to wash them because you're just going to throw them in with your every day laundry anyways so you aren't using any more energy than you normally would.
- Aileen, greenock scotland
What happened to the revision of the Environment Agency's (2005) report due to be released at the end of 2007? This revised report was supposed to address criticism from the Women's Environmental Network (WEN) about some of the assumptions it made about cloth nappy use which could have unjustly inflated the environmental impact of cloth nappies.
- Steph, plymouth
Where is the information published so that we can view the energy and water consumption of reusables? I have used reusables for several years. I wash one load of diapers(25 or so) every third day. With a family of 5, those 2 loads a week are nothing and there has been no visable increase in my water consumption of electric usage. I have compared bills from before and after.
Also, what about those people that dry on lines out doors? Has that been taken into consideration. What about the chemicals used in disposables? How about the natural resources used to produce disposables as opposed to the natural resources used in washing?
- Rachel H., Atlanta, GA
Surely it is still more environmentally friendly to use reusable nappies. Are they just assuming that only the one nappy would be washed at a time instead of a few or that the nappies would be put in with the general washing?
- Paul Urban, London, UK
