NORWELL – A daycare company and a waste management company in Massachusetts have teamed up to turn dirty diapers into electricity.
Diapers in electricity
Six Bright Horizons childcare centers now put all their used diapers and wipes in special Huggies bins. The diapers eventually end up at Reworld in Haverhill, where they are turned into something much more useful.
“They’ve been used, they’ve been fully used. Numbers one and two, and that material is all being converted into electricity for the New England electrical grid,” Brett Stevens, senior director of Reworld, told WBZ-TV.
After the dirty diapers and wipes are steam sterilized to kill bacteria, they come to Reworld, where a giant mechanical claw mixes them with other waste. It is the beginning of a process known as waste-to-energy.
“We move waste to a boiler. That boiler destroys or thermally heats the material that creates steam energy. Steam energy goes through the turbine to the local electrical grid. And that water that was in those tanks goes through a closed loop process to be returned directly enter our boilers,” Stevens explains.
Since January, the pilot program has diverted more than 33,000 pounds of diapers from landfills and generated three megawatt hours. That’s enough to power five local homes for a month.
Expensive process
But thermally destroying waste costs more money per pound than landfilling it.
“They’re going to recover energy from it, which is better than not recovering any energy from the carbon in the diaper. That said, incineration for waste-to-energy is still a carbon-producing, CO2-producing carbon technology,” UMass Lowell said professor of plastics engineering Margaret Sobkowicz-Kline.
“If the whole mess was compostable and biodegradable, so to speak, and we had facilities where we could do that, that would be an excellent solution as well.”
Reworld says it does not currently have a process to capture carbon, but does use a method that significantly reduces emissions, well within federal regulations.
The EPA says disposable diapers are the third largest source of waste in American households. Currently, there is no such thing as a 100% biodegradable disposable diaper on the market. That’s because diapers are made of plastic and absorbent polymers that take hundreds of years to break down, taking up space in landfills.
“There are only a limited number of landfills open and even those have very limited capacity. Especially in New England, where the population is very dense and the waste problem is very large,” Stevens told WBZ-TV.
“I think it’s a mindless thing. You throw something in the trash, and it goes in a bin and gets taken away,” said Michelle Baker, assistant director at Bright Horizons in Norwell.
Baker is the mother of twins and has worked in Bright Horizons classrooms for 23 years. Although she used to not think twice about throwing away a diaper, she is excited about the new possibilities of big messes, which make a big impact.
“It’s a lot of waste and if we can keep that out of the landfill, we want to be part of that,” Baker said.
Cloth diaper option
There is another solution to the problem, but not many parents are ready for it: the reusable cloth diaper. There are local companies that offer diaper washing services to various communities in the Boston area.
“Some old-fashioned solutions are not particularly useful, but reuse would really be at the top of the zero-waste hierarchy,” says Professor Sobkowicz-Kline.
