Wednesday, June 1, 2005

Wipe out

By KAREN KLAGES
Chicago Tribune

If someone were to load all of the disposable wipes purchased by consumers in North America last year onto 18-wheel semis, the caravan would number 9,000 trucks and stretch for 68 miles. And it would be carrying 83,000 tons of these seemingly ephemeral cloths — which are anything but fleeting.

Largely, they’re synthetic in nature (non-woven polymers, sometimes mixed with wood pulp). And they’re not readily biodegradable.

About 30 percent of those wipes — $800 million worth — would be meant for home cleaning, according to the Association of the Nonwoven Fabrics Industry. (The others: baby and personal care wipes.)

This would include all the Swiffer dry cloths and wet pads, the Grab-it cloths, the Mr. Clean MagicReach scrubbing tub/shower pads, the Clorox disinfecting wipes, Lysol wipes, Pledge wipes, Windex wipes, Fantastik wipes, Weiman leather wipes, Scotch-Brite Scrubby wipes, Easy-Off wipes for cleaning the microwave, wipes meant for cleaning stainless steel, wipes for cleaning granite countertops, and on and on and on to the landfill they go.

Wipes are the largest component of a “use-and-toss” trend that is sweeping the home-cleaning industry and introducing Americans to all sorts of single-use cleaning products. The growing list now includes such curiosities as toilet brushes with disposable heads meant for just one swim in the bowl.

All total, disposability in home cleaning is now a multibillion-dollar industry and trend whose allure is convenience.

And it’s one that’s raising the eyebrows of environmentalists, earth-minded consumers and at least one green chemist whose concerns range from the quantity of garbage that all these products are generating to what all this carefree throwing away says of American life.

“For the sake of convenience, we have turned into a throwaway society,” says Lisa Mastny, senior editor with the Worldwatch Institute, which is based in Washington, D.C. “We don’t buy things to last and manufacturers don’t make things designed to last.”

“It’s just one more gargantuan waste stream,” says Betsy Taylor, president of the Center for a New American Dream, a Maryland-based organization that provides information to help consumers live the good life, but in a way that is gentler on the planet. “Every time a new product is developed like this, which is made to accommodate our very rushed, busy lives, we are not considering the long-term effect on our environment.”

Because the category is relatively new (Procter & Gamble’s Swiffer mop ignited the trend in 1999), there is little data on what that long-term effect may be.

In fact, one government agency after another — including the Municipal Waste Management Association, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation — says the equivalent of: We haven’t thought about it yet. Quickly adding that 83,000 tons of wipes is a lot of waste.

P. Aarne Vesilind, a professor of civil engineering at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa., and a specialist in solid waste management, gets to the heart of the “throwaway” issue, perhaps best.

It’s not that the U.S. is running out of landfill space, Vesilind says. The concern is more for the waste that results from hauling and managing all our waste.

In most parts of the country, solid waste is transported long distances to disposal, Vesilind says. “The amount of fossil fuel (used) in running those trucks is absolutely phenomenal and the pollution from it — the waste,” says Vesilind, who also notes the resources that go into managing landfills to make sure their leachate is not leaking into the groundwater, their covers are not eroding, their slopes are not sliding.

For their part, manufacturers behind disposable cleaning products say they are simply responding to consumer demand for greater convenience.

Consumers want cleaning routines that fit around their schedules, says Joe Miramonti, research and development manager for the powerhouse Swiffer brand at Procter & Gamble. “These products make that happen for her,” Miramonti adds. “Traditional ‘cleaning day’ is not a realistic concept anymore.”

At 3M, maker of the Scotch-Brite brand of disposable wipes and toilet scrubbers, “we talk about a ‘quick-cleaning behavior’ of consumers,” says Mark Sorlien, technical director for the home-care division laboratory. It’s a trend that has emerged in the last decade, Sorlien says, and speaks of the time constraints facing families.

All three of the companies we spoke to (Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson and 3M) say they have thought about it and that environmental sensitivity and lifecycles figure strongly into their product development. But that sensitivity must be balanced with the “need of the consumers,” as Sorlien at 3M put it.

“We have to make some judgments based on that,” Sorlien says. “What the consumer wants is what they’re going to buy. We don’t go out and make them buy things they don’t want. They tell us the things they are looking for. It’s always a balancing act.”