Can Disposable Diapers Go Sustainable?

As an eco-conscious parent, Carrie Pollak’s idea of sustainability was to forego diapers entirely. Instead, she opted for elimination communication, which relies on timing and cues to recognize when a baby needs to use the toilet, aiming to reduce or even eliminate the need for diapers from a very young age.

While this method may not be everyone’s first choice, Pollak’s decision reflects a growing desire among parents and caregivers to find more environmentally friendly options for their little ones. In 2024, the market for plant-based diapers reached $1.42 billion, and it is forecast to reach $3.52 billion by 2033.

And with good reason. Disposable diapers, which are made of everything from sodium polyacrylate — which turns liquid into a gel to lock moisture away — to water-repellent plastics such as polyethylene, reportedly make up the third-largest consumer item in U.S. landfills. Each diaper can take up to 500 years to degrade, releasing greenhouse gases such as methane into the atmosphere in the process.

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Keeping disposable diapers out of landfills is what has driven Pollack’s desire to offer more sustainable options. In 2018, she purchased Diaper Stork, a Seattle-area cloth diaper subscription service. Cloth diapers are provided to customers, picked up, cleaned and returned for a fee. But that wasn’t enough for Pollack. Although she believes cloth diapers are the most sustainable option available, she was aware that to scale the use of disposable diaper alternatives, she’d need to be innovative.

“It was always on my mind,” she says, “on how I could make this a bigger company with a broader impact.” Her answer was to purchase Boo, a diaper company providing compostable diapers made from bamboo.

In Washington State, plant-based diapers such as Boo’s can be composted at home as long as they contain urine only, because human urine is generally sterile. But this can be a complicated, time-consuming process requiring a home-composting system that maintains the proper temperature, moisture and oxygen levels, as well as the correct ratio between brown and green materials.

As a general rule, plant-based disposable diapers are broken down fastest as part of an industrial composting system. It therefore became Pollak’s dream not just to compost diapers, but to turn them into biochar, a type of compost that experts believe could replace synthetic fertilizers. Historically, biochar was made from heating plants and wood at extremely high temperatures (upwards of 900°F) in an oxygen-deprived environment. When organic waste such as that found in a diaper is heated, the process kills any pathogens that it may contain.

But turning diapers into biochar had not been done before in Washington State, and there was no precedent for lawmakers to establish a permitting system for the process, says Pollak.

So she worked with regulators, slowly but surely gaining the permissions needed to move forward. “Permitting is always a difficult process with anything in waste management,” says Pollak. But perseverance paid off and, since 2023, a large shipping container near Olympia, Washington, has been ground zero for Diaper Stork’s diapers-to-biochar operations. Diaper Stork and Boo now work together to provide both compostable and cloth diapers to Pollak’s clients, and together the two services have diverted over three million diapers from landfills.

Pollak is not alone in her ambition to tackle disposable diaper waste. Since 2002, the city of Toronto has kept diapers (and sanitary products) out of landfills by accepting any soiled diaper, other than cloth, in their city-wide Green Bin program, alongside the usual vegetable scraps and coffee grounds. The plastic is then removed from the diapers and turned into synthetic gas, while the solid human waste is turned into compost.

To date, according to Erwin Pascual, manager of solid waste policy and planning for the City of Toronto, over 854 metric tons of diapers and sanitary products have been diverted from city landfills. “The process is rare across North America,” Pascal says, “because it involves a pretty large investment in the processing infrastructure that can handle plastic-heavy waste.”

While it is true that waste-to-energy processes such as this significantly help reduce waste volumes, they also raise concerns over the resultant emissions, as well as their health and environmental impacts.

For Kyle Brown, a father of two small children under three years of age, the idea of composting diapers appeals. “My wife and I had ideas of wanting to use reusable diapers and ended up just using traditional [disposable] ones,” Brown says. “I thought [reusables] were going to be a lot more effort and an inconvenience when we were going through a new life experience. I didn’t really know that compostable diapers were a thing.” If he or his wife had known, he says, they would have seriously considered the idea.

But of course, as most parents and caregivers of little ones know, what really matters is absorbency. Leaks can be messy for both the baby and those changing the diaper.

When Sheri Friesen’s son was born, she decided to use cloth diapers. Compostable diapers in the 1980s were not available. “My mom used them, so I used them,” she says. It was, she admits, a lot of work to wash and clean the diapers. What’s worse is that they’d often leak urine or poop down the baby’s legs or up the back, which also meant extra bath time for the baby. Friesen says she would have used compostable diapers, but only if they were absorbent enough.

A recent study from South Africa has not only found that bamboo has greater antibacterial properties compared to cloth diapers, but that bamboo fiber or bamboo textile is highly absorbent.

Last year, Diaper Stork received a grant of approximately $154,000 from the Washington State Department of Commerce to integrate biochar into composting operations. With this funding, Diaper Stork plans to expand compostable diaper services and research so more parents and caregivers are able to choose sustainable options for their little ones.