Man said disposable nappies should be banned

Yy. Over time reusables are much cheaper than disposables, particularly if you use them for more than one child. (in my case I will be and I have received a lot of hand-me-downs from a friend) BUT convenience is a factor, and if you are a single parent, working long hours, reusables may not be a feasible option. Particularly if you earn very little and have tp do your laundry in a laundrette etc.

Yes, a nappy laundering service from the council for those on lower incomes would be brilliant, but I'd like to see that happening in the current climate.

(As an aside, I'm willing to bet that lower income households have a far lower carbon footprint on average, so their environmental impact is reduced anyway)

A good idea would be to change the way we get rid of disposables. If local councils can incinerate nappies and pads for the disables then why not for the rest of the dispo nappy wearers.
It would add an extra bin for households and would need incinerators to be better but it would provice free energy so would be beneficial for everyone.

I agree with LieInsAreRarerThanTigers, I wouldn't ban disposables but it would disincentivise them and take the negative externalities created by the use of disposable nappies into account for those who use them.

slap an environmental tax on them and let people make their own minds up

you would be quite within your rights to bite anyone's head off for having a go at women though - it's parents not women who have responsibility for nappies and nappy changing. tbh, having kids at all is not exactly environmentally friendly so maybe it's better to start there and work up to the whole 'what to put on their backside' issue later on. plenty of environmentalists pushing for the 'two child' policy for example

LieIns - as I said back in page 2, I do need to use a tumble drier...

No matter how long I leave things to dry inside, they do not get dry. After three days, if your clothes still aren't dry, they either need to be washed again, or they go into the drier. And I'm not prepared to wait three days for my clothes to dry since a). we need them sooner than that and b). they're musty-smelling and unclean by that point.

As I say, I live in a sub-tropical climate - it rains at some point pretty much every day through winter and centrally heated houses are the exception to the rule. Houses can be very damp and things simply do not get dry inside.

I am more environmentally unfriendly via my constant use of the drier, plus the cost of running the thing is much greater than it was when we lived in the UK.

All well and good for those of you in the UK to pontificate on how things should be done. I do mean that light-heartedly, but there's many, many reasons why the uptake of disposables has been so huge.

also bearing in mind that the very poorest don't have washing machines anyway and still use laundrettes.
And I'm not sure how they feel about people washing dirty nappies there.

yes, lets punish poor women as much as possible, and only let rich women have an easier life. That will help enormously.

As for the sexist issue, well I guess that's for his wife to fight out with him. I certainly didn't get much help on the nappy front; all the more incentive to toilet train early!

I wpuld like to see disposables not made illegal, but highly taxed to make them a luxury not a product which is taken for granted, with incentives for using cloth and council-run nappy laundering schemes.
You can already save hundreds by using cloth - ridiculous to suggest otherwise. I spent no more than £100 on cloth nappies initially (ok that was 11.5 years ago so add inflation), then £30 on new sizes of wraps as dd grew. No new bits bought for ds when he came along. I was given a few more over the years from friends/cousins who had finished with theirs, and am still using a few pre-folds as floorcloths now, having passed most of the kit on to be used by someone else.
You don't need to do special hot washes, you don't need a tumble drier, and if you have a washing machine the effort is minimal. If people want to save water they could do a lot more by being careful with how they use it and changing sheets and towels less often. I can't believe some of the laundry regimes I have read on here!
I also did some form of ec and rarely had a dirty nappy from about 8 months. DD was finished with nappies completely by 2. Society is so brainwashed by big business few people look into alternatives.

My mum didnt saf. I was born in 1968. It was nappies boiling on the stove top and plastic pants.
I do some some hippies who do EC. They have. Alot of wee and poo on them. No way are they coming over here!

we use terries, atm I'm at home on mat leave and DH works FT, I however have only sorted out one bucket of nappies in the past 5m...

just because the man isn't there for the majority of nappy changes doesn't mean he doesn't deal with his share of pooey nappies!

fwiw we've never owned a tumble dryer and managed year round in a flat without any outside space, using terries and wraps bought for DD1 again for DD2, along with a stack of terries my mum had in the loft which were used on me - secong generation terries, you can't get more ecologically sound (or cheap) than that!

We use disposables - it's not a feminist issue in this house, though: DH is a SAHD and changes most of the nappies. Before DS was born I thought maybe we should use washables (I worry about eco-stuff more than he does), but left the decision to DH as most of the work would be his. We don't have a car and we don't fly anywhere, so I reckon it probably evens out.

Oh, and we've never run out of nappies - I just stock up every time I get shopping delivered.