11-7-02, Danny McBride
Poop Poop Be Duped
By Danny McBride
IPS Features
News item: Dateline, Santa Clarita, CA. “The City Council will consider Tuesday whether to approve a contract launching a state-of-the-art program to recycle the city’s dirty diapers” writes Heather MacDonald in a recent edition of The Los Angeles Daily News. She goes on to point out that no other city in America recycles its dirty diapers.
Now don’t get ahead of me here. This is a serious topic and this Los Angeles suburb may very well be onto something. After all- -don’t all the great innovative trends and trendsetters originate in California? (Richard Simmons, Tony Robbins, EST?)
According to the Daily News, a disposable diaper processor will be purchased for about $100,000 (One Hundred Thousand Dollars) in a pilot program that will be tried in a few of the city’s neighborhoods. If it is successful, the program will be expanded citywide, to all of Santa Clarita (motto: we’re full of it but we live near Six Flags Magic Mountain).
Special 34-gallon diaper-only bins will be distributed to each household in the test neighborhoods and will be collected on trash day with the rest of the refuse. Thirty-four gallons? What do they think people will be diapering, baby hippos?
Here in L A we already have to put out three separate color-coded barrels on trash night- -blue barrels for “recyclables” (glass, cans, newspapers, etc), green barrels for “greens” (lawn and garden compostables), and black barrels for whatever else there is that is really trash. Now there will be a fourth color-coded (beige?) container for certain residents in Santa Clarita. I know what you’re thinking. Does it only take Pampers, or are Depends acceptable?
There are a lot of details to work out. Trash haulers will pay $38 a ton to dump the diapers at the processor, which, by the way, the City of Santa Clarita hopes to locate in the City of Burbank, not Santa Clarita. But Burbank already has two or three big operations that reprocess garbage for public consumption- -They’re called movie studios. I guess doing the diapers there won’t much matter- -maybe even an improvement.
And I’m wondering, because the story doesn’t say, what this reprocessed diaper-and-its-contents material can be made into- -more diapers? Food packaging? Animal feed? They don’t say. And for good reason.
“Hey, Harry, what’s for lunch?”
“Bean burritos.”
“Yum.”
It all sounds like an episode of Rugrats, where Tommy and Chucky decide to open a lemonade stand, but without the lemonade, only fudge, and perhaps “Cat-Pan Toys”- - “Little Litter Critters”.
When I first heard of the program to recycle disposable diapers, I figured it was something each resident was going to be called upon to participate in on their own. Maybe they would all get together and scrape them clean, or wring them out, and then set them out to dry so they could be re-used. But as we now know the diapers are to be collected and trucked to the processing plant.
I talked this over with my focus group of one (a local eleven-year-old) and I was asked what they used when I was a baby. I pointed out that we recycled diapers exclusively in those days. “Really?” Yes because they were made of cloth. “Cloth!!” She was horrified. “But how did you get them clean?” Washed them. “Unreal.” In the washing machine.
I didn’t realize just how many different kinds of products qualify as disposable diapers. My first thoughts, of course, were of “Pampers”, the first disposable diaper- -introduced in 1956- -and “Huggies”, the brands I wrapped my own kids in. Of course “Luvs” came along as a bit of an upscale brand shortly thereafter, but now there are “Comfy Bummy Diapers”, “Tushies”, “A Little Behind”, “Pull-Ups”, “GoodNites”, “Wee Bees”, “The Happy Nappy”, “What’s Hempening Baby?”, and literally dozens of others. And, as we also know, there are “Depend Undergarments, Fitted Briefs, and Guards For Men”, as well as “Poise” pads (for extra absorbency) and “A&D Personal Care” for “bladder leakage” (that’s what it says on the package- -makes you want to call the plumber).
This could really be the start of trash-separation-silliness. Let’s have a barrel for coffee grounds only, or banana peels. Oh I realize that these diapers don’t decompose in landfills for hundreds of years and we would be better off recycling everything we could, just like Christmas fruitcakes, which nobody eats, but merely passes on to somebody else.
If they truly want to be as natural as possible, instead of being duped into spending thousands of tax dollars on this disposable diaper recycling plan, they should just give everyone in the test neighborhoods a bunch of clean cloth diapers and a shiny new pail. There are much better washing machines now. Each resident could nicely do their own.
One other aspect of this whole nonsense is the $20,000 public education program planned to encourage residents to recycle their babies’ diapers. Let me save you some money: “Hey!! Soiled? Duh, WASH!!” Next we’ll be having a special barrel for “Jonny Cat”.
“Yeah, we’re gonna use this on the icy roads come next winter.”
I’d “Luv” to “Pamper” you with more about all this but I’m too pooped out. Will it work? Depends.
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