Real Nappies are .....

Better for baby

Plastic 'disposable' nappies contain paper pulp, absorbent gel granules and chemical additives in the plastics and perfumes and concerns are mounting about the possible health risks.

• The gels and chemicals are claimed to be non toxic, however, no independent UK or European testing appears to have been carried out.
• The absorbent gels draw moisture up away from the baby's skin, however, the effect of the extreme dryness on a baby's skin and genitalia remains unstudied.
• A baby's skin will absorb more than 60% of what is placed upon it.
• Recent research suggests that plastic disposables keep baby's testicles at a higher than normal temperature, which might pose a risk to future fertility.
  
  Better for the environment
  

• Around 4% of all waste is made up by disposable nappies. In the UK we throw away around 3 billion disposable nappies a year, that's 8 million a day that go to landfill site near you.
• Nappies may take hundreds of years to decompose in our landfill sites, that means every disposable nappy ever made still exists.  Even when they do decompose, they produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
• It takes one cup of crude oil to produce the plastic for 1 disposable nappy.
• 7 million trees are forested to produce Britains nappies each year, around 70 square miles of forest. That's approx. 4.5 trees per child. Some of this paper is derived from ancient Scandinavian forests which is being replaced with monoculture plantations, destroying habitats for a number of species.
• It is estimated that 1,796 tonnes of disposable nappies were disposed of in Dundee in 2004/05
• Ecological 'footprinting' is a way of comparing the impact things have on the environment. Taking into account the raw materials and energy required to make both disposable and cloth nappies, the energy taken to transport and use (including washing) the nappies, and the disposal and decomposition of them, the ecological 'footprint' of using cloth nappies is much smaller than using disposable nappies:
• These footprints represent the land required for each baby each year - bear in mind that an average football pitch is 7,500 m2. 

Further information about the environmental impacts of disposable nappies can be found at www.wen.org.uk.