A diaper composting experiment is being carried out in five nurseries in Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis, to reduce the ecological impact of diapers, produced from plastic.

In France, three and a half billion diapers are thrown away each year.

And when they're buried in the ground, they take 500 years to degrade.

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What to do with the mountains of waste that are baby diapers?

Before being clean, each baby uses between 4,000 and 5,000 diapers.

Three and a half billion diapers are thrown away in France every year.

Except that the vast majority of them are produced from plastic, therefore from petroleum, and therefore go into the so-called "normal" trash.

They are therefore incinerated or buried in the soil of landfills, and will take 500 years to degrade.

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Cellulose and corn starch layers

To fight against this too much waste, a composting experiment was launched in five nurseries in Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis.

In Pantin, for example, babies wear prototypes of compostable diapers, made of cellulose and corn starch.

"They look like a normal diaper. You can tell it's cotton inside," says Carmen, who is removing a diaper from a little boy.

She must then remove two small plastic scotches, the only non-recyclable elements, before throwing the layer in a special trash can, which goes to composting, one kilometer away, in an electric car.

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Objective: treat layers by the millions in 2022

A large machine, which is in fact an industrial composter, has been installed on a vacant lot.

The crushed layers become coarse compost.

And in two weeks, it already looks like dirt.

"We can see that it's black. It smells pretty good", attests Maïwenn Mollet, head of the "The fertile layers" project.

"The idea is to show that on a small scale, it is possible, with the compostable layer, use in nurseries, collection and transformation into compost. We are now working on the next step for 2022 to process layers by the millions, ”she continues.

For now, the layers used are prototypes manufactured by one of the Intermarché factories and not yet on sale to the public.

But it could be the case on a large scale very soon: the challenge now is to make them quickly competitive in price.