The Sundance Channel’s new environmental program, The Green, has several very interesting episodes available for view online. Look at this list and see if you see what I do:

• Crapshoot: The Gamble with Our Wastes – dangerous sewer toxicity
• Waste = Food – planning true recycling of waste from the moment of manufacture
• A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash – when oil fields go dry

I see diapers.

Sewer Waste? I have seen lately how many people are flushing petro-chemical wastes down the toilet in the name of eco-diapers. What does this add to the toxic load of our wastewater treatment systems?

Waste = Food. To make diapers truly sustainable, everything left after the working life of a diaper needs to become food for another process.

Crude. I continually wonder why people are willing to use plastic, a product that originates as crude oil, to do a job that renewable resources do perfectly well.

Eventually, it is obvious to me, we will start to see serious questioning of plastics . It won’t just be a matter of endocrine disruptors , precocious puberty, and banning of phthalates.

At what point do we say that we need all of the petro-chemical products we can get to stuff into the tanks of our SUVs? At what point do we face up to the health hazards of, for example, Super Absorbent Polymers next to our precious babies’ thinnest skin? When will we realize the importance of using renewable resources to deal with predictably reoccurring necessities like babies’ elimination?

Well, not yet. But, I am glad to see the beginnings of questioning plastics as part of the (not quite yet) mainstream conversation on the role of petro-chemicals in our lives.

Our stock of diaper bags is low–really low. Exactly one. I’ve been dreading replacing the hemp batik diaper bags we carry, but the company had gone out of business, so we just have the stock we have.

A customer called this past week. She already had one Mom about Town hemp batik diaper bag, but she thought she probably needed another because the rainbow batik was just calling to her. We talked about why she liked the bag–the softness, the shape, the nylon tote bag to keep wet diapers separate. I told her I was just about to ask customers to help me replace this favorite diaper bag with another, and she said she would like to help.

She surprised me by digging to find out that Mom about Town diaper bags are going back into production. Yeah! She didn’t have to dig very far. There it is right on their front page.

So, I wrote to tell owner Paula Vaden how excited I was to hear this and let her know that I would be very happy to restock her bags the minute they are available. Paula confirmed. Mom about Town diaper bags are coming back. What good news. I love to support small, woman-owned companies–especially one with such a great owner as Paula Vaden.

No, I’m not necessarily suggesting you try it on your baby, but I find it fascinating to know what was used for diapers historically.

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From the west coast to the east coast, you can find cattails growing in wetlands and at the edges of ponds. Native people used the down from mature female cattail flowers around their babies for warmth and for absorbency. The fluff of cattails was used as a natural baby diaper.

When the cattail flower is green, it can be boiled and eaten like corn on the cob. (Just in case you are looking to expand your diet.) The mature female flower is the soft brown part that looks like the tail of a cat. When this flower is picked mature, it can be torn apart or left to explode into a mass of soft bits that allow the seeds to float on the air and spread far and wide.

I had heard about people using cattail down in diapers, and I wanted to see how well cattails absorb fluid. You can see the steps I took in images below.

• Down (catch it before it blows away). Very silky.

• Pour water out and use the cattail down to sop up the water.

• The outside doesn’t feel very wet, but the inside absorbs.

• When I squeeze, the water drips out and the outside feels dry again.

• As I try to get the sopping fluff off my hands, it starts to dry at the edges and blow away.

• The down that is soaked the most is difficult to get off my hands. For those who used cattail down for diaper and menstrual absorption, I can’t quite imagine how difficult it must have been to get rid of it all again. Maybe you just get in the river and let it wash away.

I can see that cattail down would make an absorbent baby diaper. It even feels like it could be dried out and used again. It’s sticky when wet, though. If I had a choice, I would rather use it away from the skin as stuffing for a toy or inside a pillow or mattress for fluffy bedding.