gDiapers claims: ‘no garbage, no guilt’. The City of Vancouver, WA puts the guilt back where it belongs

Posted on Monday, February 8, 2010 by Corina

We recently stumbled across an article published by the City of Vancouver, Washington regarding the impact of gDiapers on their sewer and wastewater systems.  This article (once you sift through all of the tables and technical info describing the specifics of the studies) just confirmed what we’ve been saying all along.

Although  you might feel that you’re lessoning your footprint by flushing your garbage rather than taking it to the curb, quite the opposite is true.  Quoting from the gDiapers website, “no garbage, no guilt”.  But there should be guilt!  The various components of these “flushable” diapers can wreak havoc on a city’s sewer system (not to mention my own plumbing, as you may recall from an earlier blog post!).  If you manage to successfully flush the liner that isn’t the end of it.  On the contrary, flushing is simply the beginning of a very long journey for these seemingly innocent bits of fluff and rayon.  The manufacturer recommends a double flush to get these down the toilet.  Because the sewage pumps aren’t always able to move the solids along, city workers are having to routinely flush these little dandies along the way to finally reach the sewage treatment plant, using even more water to do that.  But that still isn’t the end.  It would seem that bits and pieces of the liners get hung up in each of the stages of turning sewage into treated waste water that can be reintegrated into the water stream.  And there’s one last problem there, too.  The cellulose (which is the absorbent gel in the liner) remains suspended in the effluent, making it cloudy.  This cloudiness interferes with the UV sterilization process that the city relies on to kill any pathogens in the water before releasing it into the Columbia River.

The conclusion that was drawn from this study was that it was better to toss the liners out with regular trash.  Hmmm… so now our options are to either clog up the sewage with the refills or to add them to the trash pile (which, by the way, is where most of the solid waste that we flush gets trucked away to anyway).  We know that there are many faithful gDiapers fans out there.  We implore you, though, if you’re going to keep using this system, please take out the middle man and just toss the soiled refills straight in the garbage.  The reality is that if you’re using a disposable diapering system there is no such thing as a “no garbage” solution.  You might be feeling as if you’re flushing your guilt away along with the diaper refill but you are in fact making a bigger environmental impact than had you simply tossed the guilt in the diaper pail!