Councils subsidise reusable nappy use

New mothers are being offered cash by councils to encourage them to take up reusable nappies. Depending on where they live, mums of babies aged under 18 months are being offered up to £80 to ditch disposables and use a nappy laundry service.

Mothers in Hertfordshire get £80 for using a nappy laundry service for six months, reports today's Telegraph. Parents living in Harrow in north-west London get a grant of £60 per baby to allay the cost of buying real nappies, and mums living in Suffolk and Norfolk get a £30 subsidy.

According to environmental supporters of the schemes, only five per cent of UK parents use cloth nappies - that means more than three billion nappies are thrown away every year. The vast majority of disposables will then end up in landfill.

But are cloth nappies so much greener than disposables? Not according to the Environment Agency whose report last year controversially said there was little or no difference between disposables and cloth nappies. Unsurprisingly the agency's report has met with fierce disapproval from green campaigners. 'I have seen no subsequent research backing up the agency's report,' said David Sparks of the Local Government Association. 'The amount of nappies bunged into landfill sites is huge. Up to seven per cent of these sites are just made up of nappies and no one knows how long they take to disappear.'

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