If we stop and think about the number of diapers that new parents go through, we can just imagine the toll that that amount of waste takes on the environment. According to experts, a baby can go through 2,500 to 3,000 diapers in their first year alone. In the United States, an estimated 20 billion disposable diapers are thrown away annually, and they take about 500 years to decompose.   Although reusable cloth diapers are an option, the amount of time and effort it takes to wash dirty diapers is incredible and few cities offer services that wash cloth diapers. Luckily, a new option is available for eco-conscious and time-strapped parents. Dyper, a diaper subscription company, composts dirty diapers.   Working with TerraCycle, Dyper had launched its ReDyper program, which allows subscribers to return their dirty Dyper diapers in special bags and boxes that adhere to United Nations HazMat shipping standards. After the box is full, parents can print a prepaid shipping label from the TerraCycle website and send their diapers to the TerraCycle distribution centers, which will deliver them to industrial composting facilities that turn the diapers into compost used for such things as vegetation on highway medians.     The ReDyper program has just been added to Dyper’s subscription model, which was first launched in 2018. The subscription delivers bamboo diapers that unlike plastic diapers use no ink and contain no chlorine, latex, alcohol, perfumes, PVC, lotions, tributyltin, or phthalates. Although other companies sell bamboo diapers, if they are not composted, they’ll simply end up in a landfill, where they won’t decompose.   The ReDyper program allows all soiled Dyper diapers to be composted. “It’s got to be super convenient. It’s got to be, frankly, as close to convenient as possible relative to throwing it out,” says TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky.   TerraCycle, a private recycling company, used to run a small recycling program in Amsterdam with Pampers. Their new venture with Dyper gives them a national platform in the U.S., where diaper waste totals 3.5 million tons per year. Meanwhile, there are no other diaper recycling programs available anywhere in the country.       As for the carbon footprint of receiving and sending the diapers, Dyper works with carbon offset nonprofit Cool Effect, which offsets the amount of each delivery, giving subscribers offset certificates from Cool Effect after each delivery via email. The ReDyper program costs $39, along with the regular Dyper subscription, which is $68 for a four-week supply of diapers, yet Bruce Miller, president of Dyper, believes the expense is justified.   “The value isn’t just calculated on the specific cost. We are not the least expensive and we’re not the most expensive, but we feel when we take this whole approach of using safe ingredients such as bamboo and nontoxic chemicals, and we don’t print on our diapers and our boxes, and offsetting, and trying to compost and getting people to compost, we feel the value is very real,” he says.