Climate Action Day 42 – Weigh Your Diaper Options

Shopping and Consumer Choices

The Frog will explore The Climate Action Handbook: A Visual Guide to 100 Climate Solutions by Heidi Roop in the first 100 days of 2024

In 2015, a climate scientist was presenting a data driven talk at my company on how global warming was impacting the weather in the upper Midwest. The talk title “Climate Change in Our Own Backyard” presented an analysis of the data gathered by the vast network of weather stations in the stated and predicted the future based on facts: summers will be warmer and wetter, there will be more weather patterns with damaging heavy rains, and winters will be warmer. All these predictions have come to pass.

At the end of the session, there were questions. The presentation is open to all, and are not meant to be controversial. They can be so, it seems. For instance, in 2006 at a similar talk, someone stood up and asked whether the climate change data could be explained by something something contrails something. The speaker was gracious and answered politely that the data did not fit that hypothesis.

And so it was for the 2015 session. One of my enlightened colleagues at a supposedly science inspired manufacturing company stood up and asked the following: “would not climate change be solved if we eliminated half of the world’s population?”. The speaker, once again gracious, assured the person that less drastic solutions were possible to allow for population growth and reduced the effects of damaging climate change.

Call it the Thanos Decision – to snap your fingers, wipe out half the life in the Universe to bring balance and prevent overpopulation and depletion of resources. Search it, especially the debates of the amateur philosophers on Reddit or Quora. The ethical answer to whether his approach had merit is murky and the debate usually ends up somewhere around “maybe, but c’mon dude, really?”.

But research shows that the greatest action you can take to reduce emissions is to have one fewer child. In the study, the climate impact was arrived with an approach described by the authors where “half of a child’s emissions are assigned to each parent, as well as one quarter of that child’s offspring (the grandchildren) and so forth. This is consistent with our use of research employing the fullest possible life cycle approach in order to capture the magnitude of emissions decisions”.

The paper was more about the fact that governments and educational institution tended to play down the one-fewer child action in recommendations, opting for the more politically correct but way less effective actions of upgrading light bulbs and recycling. Classic greenwashing, in other words.

The decision to have a child is personal and complex, and impossible to quantify for any given person. True, one can perform a techno-economic analysis and decide that families that have one fewer child (or no children) in a wealthy country with high emissions per capita would have an impact on climate change. But the subject is nuanced and beyond the scope of this section.

If you are raising a family and are expecting a child, you will be, if you allow it, subjected to societal pressure and social media influence on just about every aspect of raising a child. One of the greatest controversies is the “Grand Disposable vs Cloth Diaper Debate” (which is actually not a thing and I only capitalized it for effect). What to put on your baby’s butt as a containment solution should be a decision based on your own values and family experience, and maybe informed, but not necessarily driven by data related to climate change.

So here it is. In the US, 95% of babies wear disposable diapers, and the discarded diapers end up as “about 7 percent of nondurable household waste in landfills each year”. This is obviously a municipal waste issue, and cloth diapers definitely have less of an impact on landfills.

But the climate impact of both disposable and cloth diapers is about balanced. When you do the life-cycle analysis of disposable diapers you find that their carbon footprint results in emissions equivalent to burning 62 gallons of gasoline in the average lifetime of their use (roughly 2.5 years). This is roughly consistent with the carbon footprint associated cloth diapers including the production process and the energy and water consumed in laundering during the same time period.

So when are anticipating the arrival of your child, make a good choice for your lifestyle and and if you choose to use disposable diapers, do the best you can to choose companies that fit your values. In our case, we were in a position to use cloth diapers for our first child, and it was not that much of a burden for new parents in graduate school. However, the complexity of our life with two children dictated the use of disposable diapers for the second, which was not all that much “easier” than the use of cloth diapers, but was compatible with our lifestyle at the time.

For parents, the diaper years are soon behind us, and the children continue to grow and hopefully thrive. Thus the most important action you can take and perhaps the biggest impact you can make is to raise your children with full awareness of the challenges they will face in a changing climate, and work to equip them with the knowledge and skills to take action when they are ready to be the climate leaders.

Next Up: Climate Action in 2024 – Day 43: Ditch the Bottled Water

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