Santa Clarita Says It’s Time for a Change in Diaper Disposal

When it comes to dirty diapers, Santa Clarita has decided the time is ripe for a change.

Starting this spring, a thoroughly unpleasant melange of disposable Huggies, Kushies, Luvs and Pampers will be collected from 500 to 750 families each week as part of a pilot recycling project. If it’s successful, the City Council could make curbside diaper recycling available to every household--a first in the United States, according to the National Recycling Coalition.

Fans of the program say it could help keep this conservative bedroom community out of deep, er, trouble. Like many California cities, Santa Clarita has not met the state mandate to reduce the amount of trash it sends to landfills by 50%, and it could face steep fines.

If the concept works, proponents like Councilwoman Laurene Weste hope the idea will spread nationwide. Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest diaper maker, estimates that 12 billion disposable diapers are thrown out each year in the United States. And although Environmental Protection Agency figures show diapers constitute about 1.4% of municipal solid waste, tossing all of those slow-to-degrade diapers into local landfills has imbued American parents with a messy guilt complex.

“It’s just a waste,” said Ellen Harrison, who went through many a Pamper as a young parent and currently throws out 250 diapers a day as manager of a Santa Clarita day-care center. “We’d gladly recycle if we could.”

With an average age of 34 and a safe, family-friendly reputation, Santa Clarita is the perfect place to test a relatively new technology that separates a diaper’s nastier components from reusable plastics and wood pulp, proponents say.

“This place is a baby factory, man,” said Councilman Cameron Smyth.

In recent months, however, other Southern California governments that have studied the idea have determined the economics pretty much stink.

Los Angeles and Ventura counties were impressed with the recycling technology developed by the Canadian firm Knowaste, which provides diaper recycling services in Ontario and the Netherlands. But in the United States it’s a relative bargain, at an average $32 a ton, to dump trash at a landfill. Experts say a successful recycling facility would have to charge much more.

Santa Clarita’s six- to 12-month pilot program will be subsidized with $250,000 from local taxpayers, a matching grant from the state and funds from Knowaste, which is eager to show the U.S. market that its product works. During the test period, haulers will pay $28 to drop off a ton of diapers at the Knowaste recycling machine--the same amount charged at nearby Chiquita Canyon Landfill.

Councilman Bob Kellar--the only one of the five council members to vote against the experiment--noted that three Canadian cities found that costs skyrocketed after similar subsidized trial runs ended in the 1990s.

Dumping fees at Knowaste diaper facilities in Canada reached $150 a ton, and the cities canceled the programs.

“It simply did not work,” Kellar said. “Why are we embarking on such a program when it has been shown to us that it has not succeeded in three other communities?”

Service Available in Canada, Netherlands

In Canada, Knowaste adapted. Its Toronto operation is a small, pay-as-you-go service that charges families $50 per month for delivery of new disposable diapers and recycling of old ones.

In Arnhem, the Netherlands, a more ambitious city project has been successful. Dumping fees at European landfills are high enough to make the cost of diaper recycling seem reasonable, Knowaste President Roy Brown said.

Santa Clarita city staffers suggested that the council veto the program. Environmental Services Manager Jill Fosselman warned that the cost of expanding it citywide could exceed $1 million.

Too many variables make cost estimates impossible, according to Knowaste and city officials alike.

Knowaste Vice President Nazareth Chobanian said the company plans to lobby Sacramento for a subsidy for a citywide program. But Assemblyman George Runner (R-Lancaster), who helped secure the state grant, said he wasn’t sure if he’d support more state money for diaper recycling. He suggested the city pay for its program.

Weste said the City Council doesn’t want to raise collection fees to pay for the service. “We already pay a lot,” she said.

A waste analyst hired by the city estimated that it generates 6,741 tons of dirty diapers a year--about 5% of residentially generated garbage. A citywide program could handle 80% of the city’s diaper output by 2007, the analyst said.

Fosselman said that would be a best-case scenario.

A 1994 survey by researchers at Texas A&M; and Pennsylvania State universities found that the majority of American parents wished disposable diapers were more eco-friendly. However, 80% used disposable diapers exclusively, and most said they wouldn’t give them up for the labor-intensive alternative of cloth diapers.

Some States Considered Banning Disposables

Disposable diapers hit grocery store shelves widely in 1961. They quickly became an American staple. But environmental concerns grew, and in the early 1990s as many as 25 states, including California, considered measures to ban disposables, apply special taxes or slap them with environmental warning labels akin to the health warnings on cigarette packs.

Many of these efforts failed due to lobbying pressure, the development of thinner diapers that take up less landfill space and a conclusion, even in green camps, that cloth diapers may be equally harmful to the environment, given the water needed to clean them and the pesticides used to grow the cotton.

Procter & Gamble funded a few pilot recycling programs in Seattle and other cities, but they cost too much, said company spokesman Terry Loftus.

Skeptics in Santa Clarita say the push for a local program is a sweetheart deal: Chobanian, the well-connected president of one of the city’s waste haulers until he retired in 1995, “needed a job,” said resident Cam Noltemeyer, a frequent critic of the council.

Since 1998, Chobanian, Knowaste and the family and firm of the attorney representing Knowaste have made campaign contributions to the four City Council members who later voted for the recycling plan.

Chobanian says the real impetus for the program came on April 21, 1997--his first day of fatherhood.

“When I changed my boy’s first diaper,” he said. “I realized we had to look at this.”