Dirty diapers into electricity? Day care teams up with waste facility to make it happen - CBS Boston

By Breana Pitts

November 4, 2024 / 6:45 AM EST / CBS Boston

NORWELL - A day care company and a waste management facility in Massachusetts have teamed up to turn dirty diapers into electricity.

Six Bright Horizons child care centers are now putting all of their used diapers and wipes into special bins provided by Huggies. The diapers eventually end up at Reworld in Haverhill where they're converted into something much more useful.

"They are used, they are fully used. Number one and two, and that material all gets converted into electricity for the New England power grid," Reworld senior director Brett Stevens told WBZ-TV.

After the dirty diapers and wipes are steam sterilized to kill bacteria they come to Reworld, where a giant mechanical claw mixes them up with other waste. It's the beginning of a process known as waste-to-energy.

"We're moving trash into a boiler. That boiler is thermally destroying or heating up the material that's creating steam energy. Steam energy goes through the turbine into the local power grid. And that water that was in those tanks goes through a closed loop process to come right back into our boilers," Stevens explained.

Since January, the pilot program has kept more than 33,000 pounds of diapers out of landfills and generated three-megawatt hours. That's enough to power five local homes for a month.

But thermally destroying waste comes at a premium, costing more per pound to process over landfill disposal.

"They're going to recover energy from it which is better than not recovering any energy from the carbon in the diaper. That said, incineration for waste-to-energy is still a carbon-producing, CO2-producing carbon technology," said UMass Lowell plastics engineering professor Margaret Sobkowicz-Kline.

"If the whole mess, so to speak, could be compostable, could be biodegradable and we had facilities where we could carry that out, that would be an excellent solution as well."

Reworld says it currently does not have a process in place to capture carbon but it does use a method that significantly reduces emissions well under federal regulations.

The EPA says disposable diapers are the third largest source of waste in U.S. households. Right now, there's no such thing as a 100% biodegradable disposable diaper on the market. That's because diapers are made of plastic and absorbent polymers that take hundreds of years to break down, taking up space in landfills.

"There's only a limited number of landfills that remain open and even those have very limited capacity left. Especially in New England where the population is very dense and the waste problem is very great," Stevens told WBZ-TV.

"I think it's a mindless thing. You throw something in the trash, and it goes into a waste bin and gets taken away," said Michelle Baker, an assistant director at Bright Horizons in Norwell.

Baker is a mom of twins and has been working in Bright Horizons classrooms for 23 years. While she wouldn't think twice about throwing away a diaper in the past, she's excited about the new possibilities of big messes, making a big impact.

"It is a lot of waste and if we can keep that out of the landfill, we want to be a part of that," Baker said.

There is one other solution to the problem, but not many parents are up for it - the reusable cloth diaper. There are local companies that offer diaper laundering services to several communities in the Boston area.

"Some of the old-fashioned solutions are not particularly convenient, but reuse would really be the top of the zero-waste hierarchy," said Professor Sobkowicz-Kline.

Breana Pitts is a traffic reporter on WBZ-TV weekday mornings (4:30-7 a.m.).

© 2024 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.