Did you know that every year around 3 billion used nappies end up in landfills across the UK?

But now a company based in Swansea has come up with an idea to lower the carbon impact. 

Yes, for more than a decade Nappi-Cycle has been collecting used nappies in South Wales (what a delightful job!) in order to convert them into useful materials.

The re-cycled nappies have been used to build noticeboards, insulate walls and laminate floors. 

But now following the launch of a partnership with the eco-recyclers and green baby care business Pura, they’ve gone further and recently re-used 107,000 nappies to reinforce and strengthen a 1.4 mile stretch of road. 

It is claimed that the re-cycled nappies make the road surface twice as strong.

The nappies are, of course thoroughly cleaned and treated with chemicals before the useful plastic and cellulose fibres are separated out and re-purposed. 

Even though the costs of this process is around 15% greater than the cost of incineration, the benefit of removing them from the environment is huge.

NappiCycle is committed to diverting 100% of what they collect from landfills  – that’s 800,000 every week, and they are now used by every Welsh Local Authority and are now set to be trialled in Bristol as well. 

Long term they hope to make the scheme UK wide so who knows maybe a load of those irritating potholes will soon be filled in with used nappies, so if if you’re wondering about the strange aroma coming off the road on a hot day, that might be the reason!

Being a Tuesday, I was joined in the second hour by Billericay’s Queen of historical knowledge.

Today Margaret took time out to look at the career of – Dr Benjamin Pugh, a Chelmsford  surgeon from Georgian times.

Listen again here to what Margaret had to say about this gentleman: –

See you again next week,
Scott