Which nappies are better to use from an environmental point of view?

Abstract: There are many life cycle assessments performed on nappy products in different countries which differ with waste management, distances to producers of nappies and retailers. In this paper, life cycle assessment is performed using Simapro with assumptions on the Swedish customer and the current waste management that exist in Sweden to evaluate the environmental load for disposable and reusable nappies. The aim of this study is to find out which nappy is better from an environmental perspective. According to the results of this study, reusable nappies perform better in most of the chosen categories. Only a few were outperformed by disposable diapers, these include human carcinogenic, land use, water consumption and stratospheric ozone depletion. The highest impact in the life cycle of a reusable nappy was in the manufacturing phase with cotton production related processes and in the use phase, where most of the impact came from the additional electricity use. For the disposable system, a huge amount of 3796 diapers was needed in the production phase for the nappy usage of an average child. The manufacturing affects the environmental impact categories like resource depletion, freshwater and terrestrial ecotoxicity, ozone formation, global warming potential and others. These findings can improve understanding of different environmental loads of the manufacturing processes, use and end phases of the nappy and contribute to sustainable development.