Did you know With the immense amount of diapers that we throw you could manufacture items as disparate as bicycle helmets, synthetic tiles or office supplies?
Well, although it is true that in Spain we begin to worry about taking care of the environment, we still do not have recycling plants to transform them. But there are in other European countries.
And now Holland surprises us with a new recycling plant that It will transform diapers into green gas, plastics, fertilizers and biomass.
A pioneering initiative
The Dutch firm ARN is building a facility in the Nijmegen region (Holland), which will transform diapers into four products: green gas, plastics, fertilizers and biomass. This will be possible thanks to a reactor that reaches temperatures of up to 250 degrees at high pressure.
These high temperatures eliminate bacteria, viruses and possible remains of diaper medications and transform them into liquids (including the contents of urine and fecal matter).
The recycling plant, which is scheduled to open in December this year, will process about 15,000 tons of diapers a year. The plastic obtained will be used to make household items, such as garden furniture or pots. Meanwhile, the gas will become fuel for power plants and the rest of the products will be channeled to a wastewater treatment plant near the plant.
Figures that scare
A baby uses an average of four to six diapers a day. That means that a single child would need about 6,750 diapers before the age of three, at which age they are no longer used.
But there is more: if a dirty diaper weighs, just about 150 grams, we would be facing a ton of non-biodegradable waste per child!
In Babies and more, do you know how much they dispose of disposable diapers?To make matters worse, the products they contain, derived from petroleum, are highly polluting: adhesives, plastics, polyethylene.
But in addition, normal disposable diapers contain mostly cellulose, which implies that for the development of diapers that only one child would need, five trees would have to be cut.
And now to finish getting dizzy and force us to reflect: most of these diapers end up in large dumps where It is estimated that each diaper takes 100 to 500 years to degrade.
What alternatives exist?
In Spain there are no diaper recycling plants, but in other nearby countries, such as the United Kingdom and Italy.
In Babies and more Wet wipes should not be thrown into the toilet, even if advertising says they are like toilet paper So as long as recycling plants are not implemented in a neutral country to convert these “annoying” products, we have two options to take care of the environment:
Use cloth diapers, since it is always better to reduce than recycle.
Bet on ecological disposable diapers. It takes three to six years to degrade, since they are made of naturally occurring and hypoallergenic fibers, and biodegradable materials to accelerate their decomposition.
Photos | iStock
