00:00Meet Joe, my six-week-old son.
00:09For the next three years, I'll be facing a problem as old as human history.
00:14What's he to wear until he's toilet trained?
00:18For thousands of years, Western women have been soaking, soaping, washing, drying swaddling
00:24bands.
00:26Those days of drudgery are over, thanks to a brilliant invention, the disposable diaper.
00:37But as I watch the bin filling up, I begin to wonder about the real price of that invention.
00:44Joe is just one of millions of babies.
00:46If each one uses around six diapers a day, that's 2,000 a year, 6,000 by the time he's
00:52toilet trained.
00:536,000 diapers.
00:56That's one hell of a heap, piling up across the Western world.
01:03Worn for just a few hours, then chucked away, they end up in rubbish dumps, where they last
01:08a lot longer.
01:11Diapers have become a serious environmental problem.
01:13They represent the single biggest component of household waste.
01:18This problem has been created in the space of just a generation, my generation.
01:27The disposable diaper doesn't seem like much, yet it's at once a symbol of our modern aspirations
01:32and our consumerist society.
01:35It's the very first thing we put on our babies, but that very thing pollutes a world we want
01:40to preserve for them.
01:43I don't want to contribute to landfill, but nor do I want to return to the Stone Age.
01:50It's a real dilemma.
01:51What is to be done?
Comments