THE BOTTOM LINE : Top of the Heap

Only a few years ago, many new parents found themselves drummed into a panic by warnings that disposable diapers were the worst enemy of America’s landfills. Images of towering piles of poopy Pampers drove droves of them to cotton diapers--and to diaper services, whose businesses boomed in the 1980s.

But rinsing out those loaded cloth diapers and storing them until the diaper service picked them up proved to be the real measure of a parent’s determination to be green. Well, the numbers are in: Environmental correctness has lost out to convenience.

Nationwide, says a Procter & Gamble spokesman, “our data shows that nine out of 10 parents today “choose disposable diapers. That’s an all-time market high.”

Local diaper service companies are close to conceding that they’ve lost the swaddling war. “In 1990, we were serving over 13,000 customers,” says Lisa Ann Ganguin, spokeswoman for Pasadena-based Dydee Diaper Service, the largest cotton-diaper service in Southern California. “Today, we have about 4,800 households receiving diaper deliveries.” The numbers continue to decline, she says, and the company, which began a linen service in 1992, now employs 55 diaper workers, down from a 1990 high of 130.

“I think people aren’t paying as much attention to the environment as they were a few years ago,” says Ganguin, who can offer a deluge of stats and studies supporting claims that cloth diapers are better for the environment.

But the disposable companies counter with their own barrage of similarly one-sided research. The truth, though, is that neither disposable nor cotton diapers are much of a gift to the environment.

But short of raising feral children, parents have to make a choice--and they have, resoundingly. As one father summed up the diaper war: “Disposables deserved to win. Cotton diapers are icky.”