Instead of discarding dirty diapers, this Welsh company reused them to pave a road

Along the western coast of Wales, a recycling company recently paved a highway with the processed remains of disposable diapers — and it smells just like any other road.

NappiCycle, in partnership with the Welsh government, resurfaced the 2.2-kilometre stretch of the busy A487 highway near the county of Ceredigion, in order to reuse the diapers and save them from getting dumped into landfill. The Welsh government provided £180,000 ($303,500 Cdn) in funding for the project, according to BBC News.

Company director Rob Poyer said it comes as a surprise to people when they learn they're on a road made of over 100,000 used diapers. 

"To put it into context, it's just a fibre element we use," Poyer told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.

NappiCycle collects the stained diapers from local authorities and takes them to a processing plant to get a second use out of them. 

"We break down the absorbent polymers in the waste," Poyer said. "And then in essence, we put it through a washing process."

They end up with a mixture of plastic and cellulose fibres, form them into pellets and then throw those pellets into asphalt for resurfacing roads.

"We've just been doing research and development now for about a decade on what we can do with used nappies," Poyer said. "The idea basically came from looking [at] what are the fibres used in other industries."

In the United Kingdom, asphalt is normally mixed with plastic fibres imported from Eastern Europe or China. But with this pilot project, the director says that the locally-produced pellets will reduce the carbon impact of transport — and save diapers from being incinerated or sent to landfill.

Ben Lake, a politician who represents this area in Britain's Parliament, told the Washington Post that this project "could be a game-changer for how we approach infrastructure in Wales." 

Gwion Williams, a Welsh researcher of plastic biodegradation, took a closer look at the impact of NappiCycle's diaper road.

"Nappies are not an especially big source of plastic pollution in the grand scheme of things," Williams, a technician in enzyme chemistry at the Centre for Environmental Biotechnology at Bangor University, wrote to As It Happens. "But they aren't insignificant, and every effort counts. So this really is to be applauded."

Williams went on to describe the project as a valuable contribution to recycling plastics.

"They're not just going to end up as a waste problem again in a year or a few months, which is exactly what we're looking for when it comes to thinking about new ways to deal with plastic pollution," he said.

With about 24,000 tonnes of diapers discarded every year in Wales, this project follows in the footsteps of other countries that have reused plastics to pave roads.

"Of municipal waste, our recycling rates are between about 65 and 70 per cent now and are amongst the highest in the whole world," Poyer said. "Wales is an incredibly sort of patriotic country, and it's also very sort of innovative as well, in terms of achieving these targets that have been set by our government."

There's even a separate service set up across Welsh counties that only collects dirty diapers.

Williams thinks the nappy road project is a "very nifty idea" that follows the "circular economy" of plastics, which reuses plastic waste for something new.

"This is the place we need to reach with our usage of plastics across the planet if we want to avoid an even bigger catastrophe of plastic pollution," he said.

Written by Mehek Mazhar. Interview with Rob Poyer produced by Niza Lyapa Nondo.