Pioneering Eco-Friendly Hygiene and Medical Products

Disposable baby diapers provide comfort and convenience, and promote good hygiene and wellness.

The complexity of a baby diaper, however, is not immediately apparent to consumers – this is a very highly engineered system for an inexpensive single-use product.

Today’s baby diaper consists of on average 16 components – various layers of functional nonwovens and films, an absorbent core containing a mixture of superabsorbent polymers (SAP) and fluff pulp, various elastic inserts and attachments and adhesives holding the structure together.

This makes it somewhat complicated to recycle – even before it is used. The dry weight of an average baby diaper is 35 grams and rises to around 210 grams after use.

18,000 every second

The considerable post-consumer waste generated by baby diapers is estimated to be 30 million tons each year, most of which is currently either incinerated or sent to landfill.

This equates to around 1.5 billion diapers that are disposed of globally on a daily basis – 18,000 each second.

Nevertheless, attempts are being made to address this considerable waste stream problem.

In Australia, Kimberly-Clark, which markets the Huggies range of products, has embarked on a cross-country collection and recycling scheme while in the USA a company called Redyper is now delivering compostable diapers and collecting them back from users for industrial composting in 21 cities.

A used diaper recycling plant with an annual capacity of 10,000 tons has also operated for a number of years in northern Italy, backed by Procter & Gamble (P&G), which makes the Pampers products. Smart collection bins have also been installed in Amsterdam and Paris as part of other small scale recycling projects initiated by P&G and its partners.

Barriers and scale

The problem, however, is not only the unpleasant nature of such waste and the huge scale of global diaper consumption, but also the infrastructure and manpower that would need to be in place to make larger schemes effective. In addition, one-in-five households will be using baby diapers at any one time, with users changing constantly, adding to the complexity of door-to-door collections.

Further barriers include the high energy required for sterilisation and difficulties in waste water treatment due to problems such as SAP contamination.

All of these challenges work against the ability to economically compensate for collection by recycling and the scalability of all schemes to date has yet to be proven.

Fighting infection

Single-use medical nonwovens were meanwhile introduced 40 years ago to fight hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) and rapidly became successful by offering much better protection than reusable textiles.

In addition to the reduced risk of HAIs transmission, single use products are convenient for both hospital workers and patients, saving time and simplifying internal logistics. They are also cost effective and comply with all safety regulations and standards.

By contrast, reusable garments made of cotton have been shown to lose their effectiveness against microbes after just five washes and they also require aggressive washing and sterilisation.

An average hospital operating room is now literally covered in nonwovens during all surgical procedures, including the uniforms of the surgeons and support staff – medical gowns, surgical caps, shoe covers and facemasks. In addition, a patient is also swathed in nonwoven drapes of various sizes and customised procedure trays – containing everything required for a specific surgical intervention – contain many further layers of nonwoven-based sterile packaging.

In theory, all of these disposable nonwoven materials could be recycled much more easily than baby diapers, but a big problem is waste misclassification.

Caution

Safety and risk management are the main priorities in hospitals and often, there is a tendency to be overly cautious. As a result, a lot of waste gets identified as hazardous . This was especially the case during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Only 15% of medical waste is, in fact hazardous, and nonwovens – including both hospital wear and adult incontinence pads – account for around 30% of all hospital waste, with one medical gown generally accounting for 1kg of emissions and 50% of that created by its incineration.

A recent study by German consultant Schlegel has calculated that the reintroduction of reusable textile gowns alone would lead to a 17% reduction in CO2 emissions, whereas a 35% reduction could be achieved via recycling single-use products.

In Europe, there will be an estimated one million tons of single-use medical nonwovens waste generated for incineration each year if nothing changes. If, instead of being incinerated, this waste could be used as a feedstock for plastic recycling, it would have a value of more than €600 million.

Both absorbent hygiene products (AHPs) like baby diapers and medical nonwovens are becoming increasingly visible as other materials are successfully removed from waste streams; much work is currently being undertaken to come up with urgently-required and practical solutions to these problems.

Catch the recording of Nonwovens Recycling for a Sustainable Future webinar on-demand* on ITMAconnect and hear from Dr Bryan Haynes from Kimberly-Clark and Mr Alexis Gauthier from Andritz Laroche on how the industry can efficiently produce sustainable nonwoven textiles.

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*Available on-demand to ITMAconnect subscribers. If you are not a subscriber, register for an ITMAconnect visitor account now for just €25 (plus applicable VAT).