The great real nappy myth - they are just as bad for the environment as disposables, admits Minister

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.