Assembly Panel Neatly Disposes of Diaper Bill by Killing It

In politics, community groups fighting projects such as landfills and toxic dumps are said to be operating on the NIMBY principle--Not in My Back Yard.

So it was with tongue in cheek that a lobbyist for Huggies diapers this week suggested that opposition to a measure requiring environmental warnings on disposable diapers was fueled by a similar desire--Not Until Mine Is Potty Trained.

That, along with conflicting claims, led the powerful Assembly Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday to kill a controversial diaper bill sponsored by Sen. Lucy Killea (D-San Diego).

Under Killea’s proposal, companies such as Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark would have been required to put stickers on packages of their disposables by January, 1992, saying, “Environmental warning: Single-use disposable diapers create significant environmental problems and costs to the community when disposed.”

But the committee scuttled that plan with an 8-6 vote after a heavy lobbying campaign from the industry, which offered economic and environmental counterclaims. The measure needed 12 votes to move forward.

Killea said Wednesday she has decided to declare a public information victory while beating a legislative retreat.

“In a way, the strong opposition gave us a lot more publicity on this very simple, innocuous bill,” said Killea, adding she will not try to revive the bill this year.

Killea said some parents have approached her to say they intend to switch to cloth diapers. It is the kind of ecologically motivated behavior that Killea says she wanted all along with the labels, since the non-biodegradable throwaways constitute about 2% of the solid wastes packed into landfills each year--a volume large enough to create a 10-foot-wide strip on Interstate 5 from Mexico to Oregon.

Disposable-diaper companies, however, said the 2% was not enough to warrant a label that singled out their product as an environmental hazard. “The whole objective is to put a user of the product on a guilt trip,” said Gene Hill, Kimberly-Clark’s regional director of state government relations.

Killea has a second bill that would require day care centers to give parents the option of using either cloth or disposable diapers. That bill is still wending its way through the legislative process.