3 ways to reduce plastic use and make parenting more sustainable

Becoming a parent can change almost every aspect of your life, including your impact on the environment.

Parenting in a green and sustainable way can seem challenging, with baby food and snacks often wrapped individually in plastic, many brands of baby wipe containing resins that aren’t fully biodegradable and disposable nappies a major constituent of global landfill.

Avoiding waste in the early years is almost impossible. In the first 2.5 years, a baby undergoing around 4,000 nappy changes will create nearly one tonne of single-use waste. Conventional disposable nappies can take as long as 500 years to break down.

But technology and common sense can offer some of the solutions. Here are three ways that parenting can be more sustainable:

We’ve all been there, in the toy shop, faced with a wall of plastic that will soon be grown out of. Colombia-based Toynovo is seeking to change the way we approach resources for children by creating a circular economy for educational, parenting and gaming material. It repairs and recirculates toys that would otherwise end in landfill.

Working with families, schools and companies, Toynovo is based on the idea of “test-driving” items before buying them. Consumers can try items and buy them, with the view to recirculating them when they’re grown out of. Schools and families can also accumulate credit when they exchange things they don’t use, or donate them to vulnerable communities.

Around the world, second-hand platforms, or online marketplaces where people can buy and sell used goods, are gaining popularity, with key players including Poshmark, Xianyu, Vinted, Depop, eBay and Shpock.

One of the world's biggest waste problems is nappies – and not just for babies. As we all get older, there’s a rising demand for adult nappies, too: in the US alone, sales are increasing by around 10% each year, according to one study, and the market is forecast to grow at a rate of 6% over the next five years.

So finding a solution to throw-away nappies would be a key step on the way to making parenting, and care in general, greener.

One company, gDiapers, has developed a plastic-free disposable nappy and also offers a delivery and collection service. Their aim is to stop plastic pollution at the source, and also compost the plastic-free nappies, stopping them from entering landfill.

Welsh company NappiCycle is also diverting millions of nappy-equivalents from landfill, offering a recycling service that recovers the constituent parts of disposable nappies and uses them to manufacture products, including panel boards.

Working together is the best way to effect change quickly, and the World Economic Forum’s Consumers Beyond Waste initiative aims to bolster reusing and, ultimately, eliminate plastic waste. It says that currently, half of global plastic production is for single-use and just 14% of plastic packaging is collected for recycling.

It is curating circular economy solutions using its UpLink platform and wants to promote innovative consumption models that offer aspirational, affordable and more sustainable alternatives to single-use.

The Forum is closely collaborating with others, including the Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE), the Global Plastics Action Partnership (GPAP) and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's New Plastic Economy initiative.

While we can all make efforts to parent more sustainably and make better choices to reduce, reuse and recycle, it’s clear that collaboration is the best way forward, sharing best practices and accelerating partnerships that will engage consumers and harness the power of technology for good.