Daily Score Blog

Finally an answer to the question that weighs on every eco-minded mom and dad: Which is the most environmentally friendly diaper option -- cloth or disposable?

When tallying a nappy's pros and cons, cloth diapers lose points for the energy and water required to wash and dry the diapers, and for the gasoline burned if using a diaper service that picks up and returns the diapers. They win points for being reusable many times over and creating less waste.

Disposable diapers cost the environment in the raw materials and pee-absorbing chemicals used to make the single-use items, and for their long-lasting burden in landfills. Plus, they require fuel to ship them out to stores and back to the trash heap. 

There have been oodles of studies trying to answer the debate, and most come up with no clear winner between cloth or disposable, or in some cases one edges out the other -- often depending on who funded the research (this is the most comprehensive study so far).

But I think there is an answer -- and it depends on where the wee one's rear is reared.

But there’s been a big stumbling block: insurance policies.

Fortunately, California has designed legislation to remove insurance barriers that can discourage people from joining fledgling personal car sharing networks such as Spride or Relay Rides. And similar remedies are ripe to be introduced in states and provinces across the Northwest. Here's an update on Oregon.

I talked with folks in the Oregon Insurance Division and learned that Oregon drivers face the same dilemma as California ones. In the event of an accident, the insurance policy covering the offending vehicle (and not the driver) is primarily responsible for damages. So say I make my car available to a personal car sharing network during the weekdays while I’m at my office. Someone in my neighborhood who doesn’t own a car rents it one day to take his kids to pick blueberries at a local farm. He's so busy eating delicious berries on the way home that he doesn't see the brake lights in front of him and rear ends a truck. Under current law, my insurance would be liable for damages to my car and the truck. That's a scary scenario for me and the guy who sells me insurance.

Even more problematic are the underwriting guidelines that insurers follow to manage those risks. If I were to rent out my car through a sharing program, my insurance company might try to reclassify it as a commercial vehicle. That would increase my rates and make the whole enterprise less attractive. In Oregon and elsewhere, personal car insurance policies may have exclusions under which the company can deny coverage, such as “operation of a vehicle while it is used as a public or livery conveyance” or a “business use.” That means my insurance company might refuse to reimburse me if my car was damaged while I was sharing it.

How can we maneuver around these roadblocks?

On Thursday, the state Department of Ecology will tip its hand on its plan for new stormwater regulations for Washington's cities and counties in a meeting at its headquarters.

Folks concerned about saving Puget Sound say the stakes are high. Stormwater—and the millions of pounds of pollution that it carries, plus the damage it does when it blasts through salmon streams like a fire hose—is considered the prime threat to the health of Washington's inland sea.

The regulations from Ecology will in turn dictate how cities and counties set rules for how houses, businesses, public buildings, roads, and parking lots will be built. While the slow economy recently has tapped the brakes on growth in the Northwest, our population is expected to keep swelling, which means more development and challenges to protecting our waterways.  

The aspect of the new rules that's getting the most attention deals with when and how to require the use of low-impact development, which is the practice of trying to help stormwater soak into the ground where it falls, rather than shunting it away through storm drains and gutters and into rivers, lakes, or the sea.

Ecology didn't decide to tackle the low-impact development question just for kicks. After a coalition of green-leaning groups challenged the department's existing stormwater regulations as being too weak, Ecology was ordered by the Pollution Control Hearing Board to spiff 'em up.

Excerpts from the state's marching orders (pages 57-58):

I’ve spilled a lot of ink in this series about all the dangers that lurk in our food, air, water, and consumer products—mostly in the form of toxics and pollution—that have the potential to hurt pregnant women and seriously injure the brains and other organs of growing children. But as my Sightline colleague Eric de Place pointed out when he forwarded me Dan Bertolet’s Publicola post this morning, “obsessing about organic baby food, phthalate-free crib mattresses, and BPA-free bottles misses the biggest danger of them all: cars.”

Eric makes a good point. Public transit, land-use planning, our family car—none of these automatically come to mind when we think of our child's health. But Bertolet reminds us that in the US, car accidents are the leading cause of death among children.

As the work to carry the good news about Referendum 52 out to local school districts gets underway some reasonable questions have arisen about the impact of R52 on local school districts and how it works. Let’s take a quick run through some questions that have come up. 

Will the passage of Referendum 52 affect my school district's bond rating or the state’s rating?

No. Both the state and local school district bond ratings will be unaffected by the passage of Referendum 52 for four reasons. First, local school districts will not be borrowing the money or paying it back. The state will authorize and sell the bonds to fund an account for projects. Local districts don’t assume any risk with the passage of Referendum 52.

It's so satisfying to be able to promote a pro-environment stance that's also sweet for the money-crunching bottom line. Especially when the audience for that pitch is Washington's business community.

That's what Sightline chieftain Alan Durning and I got to do in an editorial about stormwater for Seattle Business magazine that's out now.

The editorial makes the case that low-impact development is the cheapest, smartest, and most environmentally beneficial way to reduce and treat polluted stormwater. The idea is that you protect a site's soil and as many trees and plants as possible, which in turn will catch and absorb rainfall instead of sending it into the gutter. It also means building densely and limiting sprawl into untouched areas.

When and where you must build roads, parking lots, and buildings, you use low-impact development (or LID) to make them behave like the natural environment as much as possible. That includes installing porous pavement that lets the water trickle through it, constructing green roofs that soak up rainwater, and channeling downpours to rain gardens that are engineered to be more absorbent than a normal landscape job.

Research shows that the technology works, and study after study reports that it's more affordable to use LID than traditional gutters and retention ponds or underground vaults for holding the stormwater. Hurrah!

So state regulators, local governments, builders and developers, and the greenies must be rushing to the rule and code books to require LID all over the place, right? If only it were so... (stay tuned for more on an update of LID rules).

Storm drain photo from Flickr user elycefeliz under the Creative Commons license.

Update 7/21: The P-I has the story of the successful climb.

What about Washington's coal-fired power plant makes four Vashon Island moms so angry that they dump their gardening hoes and take up ice axes? Here's the short version of what inspired their group to climb Mount Rainier this weekend and call for the state to close the Centralia coal plant down in the next five years (a decade sooner than the state's current goal.)

We are a group of pretty average moms with energetic young children and busy lives. We were not mountain climbers when we started this process in February. Most of us didn’t even exercise regularly, aside from chasing our kids around, wheeling loads of compost to the garden, and taking an occasional walk in the woods.

Yet like many moms we know, we have become increasingly concerned by the damage being done to our Earth by reckless fossil fuel consumption. We feel that it is no longer enough for us to buy local, turn down the thermostat, and carpool when we can. We are called to take more drastic action. 

Better yet, watch them describe their motivation as they prepare for their ascent:

There will be a send-off party in Seattle on July 14 at Ella Bailey Park in Magnolia with food, views of Rainier, and speeches by the moms and Seattle City Councilmember Mike O'Brien. It starts at 5:00PM.