Zero Waste Week
5 September 2022
Today marks the start of Zero Waste Week but why is it important?
Single-use baby nappies, wet wipes and menstrual products cause approximately 7,832,000 tonnes of waste per year in the EU! Which is roughly the weight of a potty trained toddler, per person per year, being thrown away just in nappies, wipes and menstrual products. As many as 51 trillion microplastic particles - 500 times more than the stars in our galaxy —litter our oceans and seas, seriously threatening marine wildlife.
On average each child will go through 3,796 nappies in their lifetime. The total world consumption is estimated to be 1.37 billion nappies every day. That’s 8 MILLION nappies per day in just the UK! Seven million trees are cut down each year to supply paper pulp to make single-use nappies in the UK alone. It takes 1 cup of crude oil to make the plastic for just one single-use nappy. Per one ton of single-use nappies, 16.92kg of packaging waste is produced. Not one single-use nappy ever created has biodegraded yet.
The number of wet wipes found on UK beaches has increased by more than 700% in the past decade In 2020 volunteers collected an average of 18 wet wipes per 100 metres on UK beaches Making them the third most common litter item found.
