earth day

April 22nd is Earth Day, as I’ve been informed by the Google doodle. Apparently the movement to increase people’s awareness about the environment and climate change is not one more phenomenon started by Mr. Al Gore. In fact, it started in 1969/70 along with Woodstock and the rest of the goings on at the time.

Over the years, I have been ‘privileged’ to work with and have friends who have drummed into my head about the need for being more conscious of my carbon footprint, disposing organic waste, use of plastic, fossil fuel and what not. I completely agree with the message and believe we need to do our bit to reduce our burden on Mother Earth. I still have a long way to go in implementing all of the good advice.

For the most part, I try to do at least a little bit by sorting our trash, refusing all paper statements, using public transportation whenever I can, etc. But the one area where I feel extremely guilty over is in the use of disposable diapers for our kiddo. Unfortunately two years later, she is still in diapers and is only now showing some signs of going nappy-free.

One of my former colleagues once jokingly suggested that babies are the biggest threat to our environment. He meant humans in the larger sense, but considering how much waste is generated in diapers, paper towels in cleaning their mess, etc, I am beginning to think he might be onto something. According to this article, in the UK alone, there are three billion disposable nappies every year which account for about 690,000 tonnes of waste in landfills, generating methane a powerful greenhouse gas. Ouch, the guilt!!

I really wish I had thought through this more carefully and also had more time and lots more patience to have gone the route of using cloth diapers. There’s an excellent article on Slate that discusses the issue in greater detail. For eg: does it actually save more energy to run your washing machine and reuse cloth diapers as opposed to disposable ones?

I suppose one can only learn and keep trying. Happy Earth Day!!