[...] buried in each used nappy [diaper -Ed.] are hidden treasures, according to Marcello Somma, who is head of research and development at Fater, an Italian joint venture between Procter & Gamble and Angelini Group.
Fater has developed what it claims is the first industrial-scale process that can extract these valuable materials, and it is already up and running in Treviso, Italy. Now, as part of a project called EMBRACED, it is building a biorefinery next door to make best use of these recycled substances.
Technical minds have been trying to recycle nappies since 1992, says Somma, but it has proved to be a ball of trouble.
"When you change a nappy you wrap it onto itself and so basically you have a kind of bomb of four waste types intimately linked with each other," says Somma. "There is plastic waste – polyethylene and polypropylene, paper waste – because there is cellulose, a super-absorbent polymer and the organic fraction – the human contribution."
Fater, which has been trying to recycle disposable nappies for a decade, has found the trickiest stage is at the start: opening it.
Hmm, the baby's first diapers must be especially valuable, containing the black tar they do.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday October 08 2018, @07:33PM (1 child)
Is this guy a Netflix producer?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @10:41PM
Must be in charge of all of Hollywood too.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @07:43PM (2 children)
What exactly is the valuable material in used diaper? Why bother with summary if it ain't saying shit?
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday October 08 2018, @08:40PM
I sure hope they're not planning to extract lead, mercury, and other such metals from those diapers. Then again, if your kid likes to eat paint chips and you can't stop him, you might as well get paid for it.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @10:53PM
There's gold in them there nappies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @07:51PM
Those scientists don't to use dirty diapers. They want other people to do it.
(Score: 4, Funny) by edIII on Monday October 08 2018, @08:02PM
I would think the trickiest part was getting past people asking, "but why?"
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @08:27PM (2 children)
When I was there several years ago, the kids did not use diapers. They went on the street ( I know, disgusting but hey if dog owners can pick it up ...)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 08 2018, @10:04PM (1 child)
A friend of mine got a picture of a Chinese kid in Tiananmen Square taking a dump with Mao's giant portrait in the background. Sadly, he tried to get the roll developed in Beijing and the shop scratched out the negative.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2018, @12:12PM
LMAO.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday October 08 2018, @08:27PM (15 children)
100% soft cotton diapers. Shake or scrape the payload out into the toilet, and flush. Rinse the cotton clean, then throw it into a bucket of water with bleach in it. Let the bucket fill for a day or two, then put the diapers into the clothes washer. You buy these diapers by the dozen, and the new mother should have collect about six dozen from her baby showers. Those may or may not be enough to keep Baby going - she may need more for a baby who soils diapers more often than other babies. I hardly think that any infant will need more than 9 dozen, before he is potty trained.
The best thing about them? They can be used as "hand me down" diapers. The second or third child can recycle those diapers again!! Well - maybe the third is asking too much. Diapers do wear out. But, then you can recycle them for cleaning rags, or animal bedding, or just about anything that cotton can be used for!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday October 08 2018, @09:22PM (1 child)
Unfortunately bleach is a truly horrifying pollutant - worse even than the mountains of plastic-wrapping around the countless "bombs" produced by disposable diapers. It takes less than one drop of bleach to kill everything in a gallon of water, and most people will use a LOT more than a few drops in that diaper bucket. And the bleach doesn't just go away because you've dumped it down the drain - it keeps killing microbial life all through the waste-management system (which can be a serious problem if it's too common - waste management typically uses at least one microbial phase to clean the water), and then goes on down the river, continuing to kill the microbial foundation of the ecology.
Of course, ordinary soap does almost just as good a job of cleaning the diapers - You don't actually care if the 99.9% of microbes you washed away are dead or not, and the last 0.1% will be hopelessly outnumbered by all their relatives still living on baby's ass. But soap alone doesn't get rid of stubborn stains, nor does it satisfy the neurosis of germaphobes - which as far as I can tell is the driving force behind the horrible health- and ecosystem-damaging scourge of anti-microbial soaps. Microbial symbiotes are important to our health and the strength of our immune system - and anti-microbials make no distinction between the good and the bad.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday October 08 2018, @11:15PM
And the best way to neutralize bleach? Throw in some organic matter in and let that oxidant potential do the job.
I don't know, like... use some reusable freshly soiled cotton diapers?
After 1 day, assuming sodium hypochlorite at start, you'll end in having a weak solution of table salt with water soluble organic matter of a lower enthalpy.
[citation needed]
Any oxidant is bound to go inactive in the environment in a short time. Sure, if it's concentrated and plenty, it may create havoc initially, but the environment will recover.
Mountain of plastic? Unless you spend extra energy to degrade it, you'll live with it for millenia (you wish, heh). It maybe not kill you, but it will keep degrading the biosphere by its simple physical presence (from animals ingesting it when at surface to stopping gas exchange and denying normal soil biome when burried)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by splodus on Monday October 08 2018, @09:22PM (1 child)
I started with cotton nappies - ‘terry nappies’ we call them in the UK for some reason. Our eldest was tiny at birth, so it was too difficult, and I bought disposable nappies for him.
Next one was large and healthy – but she hated the terry nappies and it was too much bloody effort in the end despite months of trying different things! So I went back to the disposable ones for her…
By the time youngest came along I couldn’t be bothered to even try. It cost me about 10 quid a week for nappies for each of them, but it was just so much easier than reusable nappies. Not just the effort of washing them, but being so easy to put on, and so good at not leaking and being so easy to change and throw away the dirty one…
Of course the disposable ones are resource-heavy. The smart thing would be for governments to regulate so that all disposable nappies will compost! Pretty much every refuse collection in the UK takes compostable waste for recycling – the dirty nappies could go in with that!
I would recommend the cotton nappies, though – if you get into the routine (like you say – soak before washing and do a batch at a time) it’s not too onerous. And even if you factor in the cost of the hot water and detergents and stuff, they are still way cheaper.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 08 2018, @09:49PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrycloth [wikipedia.org] "Items that may be made from terrycloth include babies' reusable nappies (UK English) or diapers (US English) ..."
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Monday October 08 2018, @09:57PM (9 children)
Because the most rampant breeders among us are driven to spend the extra effort involved in cotton nappies, right?
(Score: 1) by Acabatag on Monday October 08 2018, @11:29PM (8 children)
The disposable ones just need to have the true cost of disposing of them assessed up front. The 'welfare mom' you were just sneering at won't be able to afford them, and their babies will be happier in soft natural cloth. Why could be better? Unless you're in the business of producing or disposing of disposables, I suppose.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday October 09 2018, @10:01AM
The 'welfare mom' you were just sneering at won't be able to afford the reusable nappies either, let alone the facilities to wash and dry them. Using a laundrette might be interesting (some don't do hot washes at all - or didn't used to, it's been a while...). The biggest hurdle though will be the upfront cost of several weeks worth of benefits - for people living week to week that just ain't gonna happen.
I've used disposables, reusable cloth, and compostable disposables. I wouldn't say the kids were happier in reusables - if anything the opposite. If I was doing it again I would get the compostables again, every time. Based on records of what we actually spent, you need have more than two kids but not more than one in nappies at a time for reusables to be anywhere near cost effective - I don't think there are many people who can family plan and execute that well.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 09 2018, @10:15AM (6 children)
What true cost? It doesn't mean making something too expensive to use. We're speaking of diapers not nuclear plants which actually have legitimate large externalities.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 09 2018, @02:59PM (5 children)
Disagree. The time, expense, and effort spent actually *recycling* the materials should be part of the upfront cost. When you buy that big bag of disposable diapers, you have ALREADY PAID for the recycling. Makes sense to me. Will that cost make them prohibitively expensive? Maybe - maybe not. Personally, I don't care. We've already discussed an alternative which costs nothing, or so close to nothing as to be forever invisible, to recycle. When you've finally finished with that 100% cotton rag, you can put it in the mulch heap. Cotton takes a pretty long time to decompose into mulch, but it does finally mulch.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 10 2018, @07:31AM (4 children)
Why? The materials aren't valuable in themselves or all that scarce. And recycling probably uses up more resources than it saves.
Someone still has to wash it. Few things are more valuable than time. And you still have that waste stream to deal with (unless you're paying for recycling baby poop too).
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 10 2018, @02:23PM (3 children)
Why put the cost of recycling right up front, as part of the purchase price? Welll - Americans especially are notorious for not bothering to recycle, even when it's free. We're too fat and lazy to separate aluminum from glass from mulchables from hazardous from garbage. Seriously, I wonder how many are just too fat and lazy to even take their trash out to the curb. Anyway - putting the cost of recycling into the purchase price will help somewhat to encourage people to recycle. It also puts the money into the recycling SYSTEM. No one wants to handle trash and garbage for a living. They sure don't want to do it for free, and they don't want to do it much more at minimum wage. Maybe if starting positions for recyclers were minimum wage plus 50%, we could get more people interested? Maybe. I'm willing to try. Instead of convicts picking up trash along the highways, maybe we would see more entrepreneurs, capitalizing on that recycling money.
Someone has to wash diapers? Oh, boo-hooo-hooooo!
Every couple days, you spend a whole HOUR rinsing, washing, and folding enough diapers to last for the next couple days. It's something that needs done - you do it. Most people spend more time than that in the bathroom, staring into the mirror.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 11 2018, @01:36AM (2 children)
The elephant in this room is that it just isn't worth recycling most of that stuff - and in practice a good portion of that waste stream doesn't actually get recycled. Now, you're asking those people to spend that time to do something of negative value with the would-be recyclers often just dumping that stuff into the landfill anyway.
Which we could just not do by not using washable diapers. As I noted before, time is more valuable than the resources that go to diapers and baby poop.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday October 11 2018, @02:34AM (1 child)
Opinion noted. And, I disagree. You seem to be rationalizing some of the worst traits of Americans, and their wasteful, disposable society. Note the use of the word "rationalizing", because you can't justify our wastefulness.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:58AM
And you seem to think recycling a small amount of resources is worth more than the parents' time.
(Score: 1) by Goghit on Tuesday October 09 2018, @04:48AM
Same thing for my two children, except we used vinegar and water in the diaper pail.
A couple of years ago when my daughter was getting ready for her first she was fussing about opinions on the internet that vingar would rot the diapers out prematurely. I pointed to our stack of wiping rags that includes diapers used by both her and her brother.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @08:27PM (1 child)
So, the valuable parts seem to be:
High quality plastics for use in other plastic products
Waste matter for fertilizer
Cellulose for things like ethanol, polymers and fertilizers
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday October 08 2018, @09:15PM
Now we know why ethanol-fueled says so many shitty things.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday October 08 2018, @09:52PM (1 child)
"If you work at the university, for the first six months of their lives, we'll provide your infants free child care, including free diapers and changing."
"Free? What's the catch?"
"We both know you're too sleep-deprived to care or argue about the reasons why we're doing this. It's a government grant paying for free childcare, and a bunch of boring science dudes volunteering to change diapers for your kids. "
"... sign me up."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 08 2018, @11:16PM
Those chores will be left to grad students to perform. Like taking the rectal temperature of hibernating bears was left to grad students.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2018, @03:35AM
It's what I read first.