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ELIMINATING THE IDEA OF WASTE®
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Service allows parents to mail back dirty diapers for composting
In Arizona, a compostable diaper company has launched a subscription service to send clean diapers to parents and receive return shipments of the used nappies for composting.
Dyper, which calls the service ReDyper, has partnered with TerraCyle, a recycling and composting company, to make the model work. First, Dyper will ship parents its bamboo-based diapers directly. After use, parents can mail the diaper back in prepaid packing materials compliant with the United Nation’s hazmat specifications. The dirty diapers are converted by TerraCyle into compost for landscaping, particularly for municipal use.
“It’s got to be super convenient. It’s got to be, frankly, as close to convenient as possible relative to throwing it out,” TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky, tells Fast Company. The diaper service costs $68 for 260 diapers, shipping included. If the parents don’t have access to composting facilities, the option to return the dirty diapers costs an additional $39.
Over 3 million tons of dirty diapers end up in landfills annually, and most take as much as 500 years to biodegrade.
Parents Are Mailing Away Their Kids’ Dirty Diapers to Save the Planet
Compostable diaper partnership launches
SCOTTSDALE, AZ., – Dyper and TerraCycle have teamed up to offer a compostable diaper. The diaper subscription service will now allow users to return soiled diapers for composting.
Though composting Dyper diapers at home has always been possible, the TerraCycle partnership allows users to skip the DIY and help ensure that their used diapers don’t add to the more than 20 billion diapers filling landfills in the U.S. yearly.
“It wasn’t easy to develop the most fully compostable diaper ever created,” said Sergio Radovcic, CEO of Dyper.
“But we are thrilled that our partnership with TerraCycle will make it easy for families to keep their used diapers out of landfills.”
Dyper subscribers that opt-in to the REDYPER program are provided with bags and a specially designed box engineered to the strictest United Nations Haz Mat shipping standards.
When the box is full, subscribers can download a prepaid shipping label from the Dyper Composting Program page found on the TerraCycle website for easy return of their soiled diapers for composting. The waste composted through this program will be used in specialized applications, such as for vegetation in highway medians.
“As the first of its kind initiative, the REDYPER Program offers consumers a unique opportunity to responsibly dispose of their soiled diapers, as well as minimize their environmental impact by composting them through TerraCycle,” said Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle.
“We are pleased to partner with Dyper to drive awareness of this ground-breaking program.”
Along with being compostable under the right conditions, Dyper’s product is made from responsibly-sourced bamboo and free of chlorine, latex, alcohol, perfumes, lotions, PVC, TBT, or Phthalates. The entire diaper journey is counterbalanced through carbon offsets purchased by Dyper on behalf of subscribers.
First Came the Milkman. Then Came Loop.
How one company is working to eliminate the very idea of waste
Since 2001, where most of us have seen trash, Tom Szaky has seen potential. From cigarette butts to coffee capsules, Tom set out to recycle the hard-to-recycle products we use. His company, TerraCycle, offers everything from free recycling programs to industrial waste solutions.
“But we can’t recycle our way out of the waste crisis,” Eric Rosen, publicist for TerraCycle said. “And [Tom] is the first to say if TerraCycle didn’t exist — or couldn’t exist — he’d be thrilled.”
In other words, he would love to see a world where we produced zero waste to begin with. That’s where TerraCycle’s latest venture, Loop, comes in.
“The next thing to do was to attack waste at the root cause,” Eric said. “If the economics are good, we can recycle virtually anything. But that’s not going to solve the problem.”
“The next step was to create a circular economy where there’s virtually no waste.”
Loop was announced at the World Economic Forum in January 2019, proposing a new model of consumption whereby people can get their favorite home goods, cosmetics, and food products through a sustainable, circular system of pick-up and drop-off using reusable containers. It took off from there. “We immediately had thousands upon thousands of people who went to the website and were waitlisted,” Eric said. “So we knew right away that there was a clamoring for this. And we’ve continued to see that as we grow.”
The company launched its pilot program that summer, beginning in Paris on May 14 and New York the following week. “We launched in a handful of states as a pilot,” Eric said. “We could not keep up with the number of requests coming in, like ‘When are you coming to our state?’ Certainly, the waste crisis, sustainability, and climate change are in the news, so people are well aware. There’s a sense now that they want to do something about it.”
Loop already has a cleaning facility in Pennsylvania and a warehouse in New Jersey, which made New York a logical place to start. As the company scales, it selects cities within a 24-hour delivery range of both a cleaning facility and a warehouse, particularly for the frozen goods it provides. “We’ll add warehouses and cleaning facilities as we go, but that’s how the places were chosen,” Eric added.
Loop will launch in the UK at the end of March, Toronto in June, and Japan towards the end of the year. Next will be Australia in 2021.
Customers receive their orders in a reusable tote and request a pick-up once items are empty. They’re then cleaned and refilled. Photos: Loop
The price of a Loop good is comparable to a regular one, plus a deposit for the packaging. Since it’s reusable, it becomes valuable. Take shampoo, for example. Before, you bought shampoo for its contents; once the bottle was empty, you would toss it.
“In this instance, now the company owns the package and the package is an asset,” Eric said. “Customers put a deposit down on each pack. When that pack comes back, the deposit is returned to the consumer.”
This deposit essentially sits in an account. You can opt to let it remain there as you continue to buy products through Loop; or, once you’re done, you can request the deposit back.
The brand owns the package, so they want that package back. This inherently makes the process a circular one, removing waste from the equation.
While Loop is currently e-commerce only, “we will be in-store at some point in 2020 in the United States,” Eric explained. With retail partners like Kroger and Walgreens stateside, Carrefour in Paris and Loblaws in Canada, you might find a Loop aisle at a grocer near you.
“The process will work virtually the same,” Eric said. “You’ll be able to bring your shipping tote into the store, where there will be an aisle with all the Loop products and packaging.” You shop, pay for the product, and bring it home, as you would any other pet food or ice cream pint. Then, as soon as you finish the pack, you bring it back. That store would then send it back to Loop to be cleaned, sanitized, refilled, and shipped back out to another consumer.
In many ways, Loop seems like the future. But it draws on our current thinking and behavior — and a model that dates back to the 1950s.
“When you finish your normal plastic shampoo, consumers are pretty accustomed at this point to dropping it in the blue bin. Now, as opposed to dropping that in that bin, you just drop it back into shipping tote.”
“We don’t want to change behavior. That becomes a much harder proposition.”
Loop isn’t the first to discover the effectiveness of the pick-up/drop-off model. Remember the milkman?
“We were seeing that model up until the 1950s when all of a sudden we turned to all of this disposable packaging for convenience. Obviously we’ve created so much waste that it’s no longer effective.
“The idea behind Loop is exactly that: it’s the milkman model where the brand owns the pack and we come collect it, sanitize it, and fill it again.”
But instead of homogenous glass bottles, companies are investing in containers you want to show off.
“One of the things we’re finding is that people appreciate and want these packs because they’re so pretty. Like the Pantene bottles: people want to leave them on a counter.”
Loop has very specific specs companies need to adhere to when creating packaging. Aesthetics is “not a requirement, but it certainly is playing a role in how these are being designed.” Most importantly, they need to be durable, cleanable, and circular (by having an end-of-life solution).
“It’s not necessarily material,” Eric said. “Plastic is not necessarily the demon, it’s the single-use that’s the problem. So these packs have to be durable.”
“Häagen-Dazs, which has made an absolutely beautiful pack, had a whole R&D team develop it. We have designers at Loop who can help develop the packaging, but, depending on the size of the company, some are big enough to do it on their own.”
Just how durable these containers are varies from company to company. “Obviously these containers are going to get banged up,” Eric said. “And it’s up to the company to determine when they want to take them out of circulation. When that time comes, the containers themselves are recyclable. They’ll be turned back into themselves by TerraCycle.”
Eric said the company is working on a public-facing Life-Cycle Assessment, which will highlight the environmental benefits of these containers—transportation costs included—as opposed to single-use packaging that most often ends up in landfills.
Ultimately, the dream would be to have a whole store filled with reusable product containers. “We would create an entirely circular economy,” he said. “There would be absolutely no waste. That is the ultimate goal.”
TerraCycle’s next project with this goal in mind? ReDyper, a partnership in which parents send in soiled Dyper diapers to TerraCycle’s facility for composting. It was announced this week.
This Service Is Saving The Planet By Allowing You To Mail Back Your Dirty Diapers
Parents Are Shipping Their Baby's Dirty Diapers to Help the Planet
If you’ve ever spent much time around a baby, you know they go through a ton of diapers. And all those disposable diapers end up getting thrown away and take up a lot of space in landfills across the country. But now some parents are mailing their babies’ diapers off to be composted and it’s all to help save the planet.
Subscription-based baby care company Dyper makes a biodegradable bamboo diaper and teamed up with waste-management company TerraCycle to come up with a more eco-friendly solution than trashing used diapers. They launched ReDyper, a mail-in diaper composting service for Dyper customers. Once parents have enough soiled Dyper diapers to fill the provided box - which is specially designed per the United Nations’ hazmat standards - they print a mailing label and send them off to centralized composting facilities around the U.S.
Now these Dyper diapers are “already technically compostable,” since they’re made from bamboo and don’t contain unsustainable and potentially harmful materials found in some other diapers, including chlorine, perfumes, and PVC. But since most moms and dads don’t have time, space, or access to a composting facility to handle this kind of messy stuff, the service makes it easy to be eco-friendly. These composted diapers will never be used to fertilize the food we eat, ReDyper’s compost is used for the wildflowers growing on highway medians. And if this help keep more diapers from adding to the 20-billion that end up in U.S. landfills each year, we’re all better off.