Page 2518 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 31 July 2019
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Ms Cheyne’s motion points to the benefits of a return to cloth nappies. These have been around for centuries, since the 19th century at least. The first cloth nappies were cotton, held in place with a fastening, eventually the safety pin. It is believed that cloth nappies were first mass-produced in the United States in around 1887-88.
Ms Cheyne has pointed to a number of councils that provide rebates, exchange stations and workshops to teach new mothers how to fit cloth nappies and calls on the government to examine similar schemes and workshops for the ACT. People of my era and older will find it astonishing that you have to teach someone how to fit a cloth nappy. It was something that you just learnt as a child from changing the nappies of siblings and cousins and the babies of friends. When you had your own babies, you generally already knew how to do it. How much things have changed. Now, new mothers and fathers may not know how to change a cloth nappy. There were a multitude of different ways to fold a cloth nappy. There was a girl way and a boy way. People had favourites.
We would like to see more research and innovation for more acceptable and environmentally sustainable products. While cloth nappies have some advantages over disposable ones, there is still a significant environmental cost to cloth nappies.
In the ACT, many of our house blocks are small and there is an ever-increasing number of apartments. People do not always have a backyard and clothesline, which is one of the key parts of having cloth nappies. It was always said that sunlight was the best disinfectant for nappies. No matter how well you washed them, even with Napisan or whatever product you used, initially in a bucket and then in the washing machine, it was still the done thing to hang them out in sunlight to be disinfected. You have to factor in the bucket to put the nappies in. Often that comes at a baby shower; Ms Cheyne talked about a baby shower. You need stain removers on an ongoing basis, as well as sanitising solutions, detergents, and fabric softeners. There is the washing machine and clothes dryer energy. It does start to increase the carbon footprint even if you use a commercial nappy service. In my day that was quite a common baby shower gift. You would give someone a commercial service for four, six or eight weeks, whatever you could afford, as a way of relieving the pressure and stress on a new mother.
We do need to have a bit of focus on research into environmentally sustainable products, not just get rid of the ones that are currently there and go to something where we need to assess the environmental impact. We need to make sure that the carbon footprint of cloth nappies does not make them just as bad as disposable nappies. Just because they are not going to landfill does not mean they do not have an environmental impact.
For example, there are currently some biodegradable disposable nappies made from different materials like bamboo, fabric and paper pulp. They use a non-chemical absorption method, and when they are thrown away, they decompose more quickly than ordinary disposable nappies. But they can still take years. We have seen that trend in many other areas, for example with the move to bamboo cutlery, plates that are easily compostable and biodegradable bags. Mr Steel has talked about
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