If you’ve ever spent much time around a baby, you know they go through a ton of diapers. And all those disposable diapers end up getting thrown away and take up a lot of space in landfills across the country. But now some parents are mailing their babies’ diapers off to be composted and it’s all to help save the planet.
Subscription-based baby care company Dyper makes a biodegradable bamboo diaper and teamed up with waste-management company TerraCycle to come up with a more eco-friendly solution than trashing used diapers. They launched ReDyper, a mail-in diaper composting service for Dyper customers. Once parents have enough soiled Dyper diapers to fill the provided box - which is specially designed per the United Nations’ hazmat standards - they print a mailing label and send them off to centralized composting facilities around the U.S.
Now these Dyper diapers are “already technically compostable,” since they’re made from bamboo and don’t contain unsustainable and potentially harmful materials found in some other diapers, including chlorine, perfumes, and PVC. But since most moms and dads don’t have time, space, or access to a composting facility to handle this kind of messy stuff, the service makes it easy to be eco-friendly. These composted diapers will never be used to fertilize the food we eat, ReDyper’s compost is used for the wildflowers growing on highway medians. And if this help keep more diapers from adding to the 20-billion that end up in U.S. landfills each year, we’re all better off.