Sweet motherhood, annoying diapers

I really do not know what it feels like to carry a growing fetus for 9 months neither do I know what it feels like to pop out the baby during delivery. However, I have a ting of how it feels to see one's baby for the first time after delivery. The joy is arguably incomparable to anything in this world. If I could feel such joy as a father, I can only wonder what it would be like for the mother.

Irrespective of whether a particular birth is the first for a couple or the dozenth one, a new lifestyle is entered into with the arrival of a new baby. While the mother might primarily be responsible for nursing the baby, the father feels the responsibility more on the financial aspect. One of those recurrent bills resulting from the arrival of a neonate is money spent on buying diapers.

When my first baby arrived, the normal routine was to use about 4 to 6 diapers per day on average in his first 2 months. As time went on and his growth continued, the number came down to 3 to 4 per day until roughly 12 months when the baby himself started throwing tantrums whenever it was time to wear diapers. In order words, he practically communicated to us that he no longer needed to wear diapers. He will always communicate whenever he wants to 'wee wee' or 'poo poo'. During the night, he will always wake up and start kicking either of us until we wake up and take him to the bathroom to ease his body.

As a father in a semi-urban town somewhere in the Southwestern part of Nigeria, the recurrent bill associated with the purchase of diapers every month is less annoying when compared to the headache you have to undergo in disposing of used diapers. Yes, there is no centralized waste disposal system around here and as such, individual household is responsible for disposing of their own wastes. Consequently, many households, including ours, have learned the art of accumulating wastes for short period and then gathering such somewhere within the vicinity of our house before setting it ablaze to burn off.

^{Used diapers, waiting to be disposed. Image by Hive account@gentleshaid}

The solution to disposing of our wastes might look simple to onlookers or outsiders until it we encounter waste components (in the form of used diapers) that do not burn. Because used diapers are usually wet, they do not burn easily. This would not have been a problem had it been that the diapers are biodegradable.

A large percentage of the commercially available diapers worldwide are not reusable and made of materials that are non-biodegradable. When one considers the sheer amount of diapers that are being used daily by parents nursing neonates worldwide, we cannot but agree that diapers are supposed to constitute an environmental nuisance to our ecosystems; and that is exactly what they do. the pollution that diapers constitute to our environment is significant.

Disposable diapers not only constitute a nuisance to the environment in terms of their non-biodegradability and associated littering, the chemical composition of some of the materials such as Tributyltin, Dioxins, sodium polyacrylate, phthalates, etc., leach into the environment and find their way to the food chains. These chemicals are not only non-biodegradable but also poisonous to living organisms in large quantities. They bioaccumulate in the body of living organisms and cause terrible health challenges in the long run.

Armed with the knowledge of how harmful these disposable diapers can be and as an environmentally conscious person, it becomes difficult for me to just watch used diapers in my household being disposed off indiscriminately. Hence, I make it a point of duty to find a suitable location where they will be less of a threat to the environment and biodiversity to disposed of them. When one considers the rate at which these used diapers pile up at home and how often I would have to go on an adventure just so I can properly dispose of them, it becomes rather annoying.

Do I have an alternative? Of course yes. But the available alternatives are not that easy to opt into. One way would be to encourage my wife to go back to the old-school way of using reusable cloth diapers and having to deal with its associated problems such as skin rashes on the butts of babies. Another would be to opt for the more expensive and less popular biodegradable diapers (I sincerely doubt if I would be able to get any around here). It is also worthy to note at this point that many of the self-acclaimed eco-friendly diapers are not biodegradable.

Summary

Motherhood can be sweet and daunting for both the mother and the father. One of the challenges that often go unmentioned is how to properly dispose of used diapers. For those that know the harmful consequences that can result from the indiscriminate disposition of synthetic and non-biodegradable diapers, it is a rather herculean task to dispose of used diapers especially in areas where there is no centralized waste disposal system. The alternative to these synthetic diapers would be to opt for reusable cloth diapers or biodegradable diapers. Both come with their own challenges anyway.

How do you all dispose of the diapers used by your babies?

Thank you all for reading.