“Human Resources: Oh Baby”
It’s Friday, and you know what that means! Our docu-comedy, “Human Resources” is on tonight at 10pm EST airing on Pivot TV! This week, the team tackles a new and challenging project: the recycling of dirty diapers.
Diapers generally go straight to the landfill, filling them up with millions of tons of untreated sewage. Instead of filling our Earth with fecal matter, the TerraCycle team tries to discover a way to recycle those dirty diapers. To demonstrate just how much they contribute to the world’s waste, here are some diaper demographics:
- 5 million tons of diapers are sent to landfills each year
- A full-time diapered baby averages between 5,000-8,000 diaper changes before the completion of potty training
- 95% of American babies wear disposable diapers
- Although disposable diapers need to be exposed to oxygen and sunlight to decompose, they do not degrade well in a landfill
- Disposable diapers take about 500 years to decompose
- Decomposing diapers release methane into the air; high concentrations of the gas can be explosive and flammable
A significant percentage of the waste in landfills belong to used diapers, so an advancement in the recycling technology of this product would be life changing, but also a great challenge—who would want to ship trucks full of dirty diapers to be recycled? This is just one of the obstacles the TerraCycle team encounters during this task.
Speaking of dirty diapers, this episode of HR celebrates one of our employee’s pregnancies with a beach-themed baby shower! Tune in tonight to get a look at the diaper-madness with TerraCycle.