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Disposable diapers have made parenting easier. There is no longer a need for pins, plastic pants, or washing diapers, and traveling with your baby is a snap. Since the first disposable diapers became widely available in the 1960s, the use has grown in popularity.
Today, an estimated 200 billion disposable diapers are used, and discarded every year around the globe. That’s a lot of diapers, plastic, and chemicals going into landfills and incinerators that are accelerating climate change, reported Fast Company. But there is an eco-friendly solution. Hiro, a new startup, just launched a diaper that comes with a packet of plastic-eating fungi that biodegrades diapers in only weeks.
A Fungi Solution
Hiro, a Texas based startup, was founded by two entrepreneurs, Miki Agrawal the founder of Think period underwear and Tero Isokauppila, the founder of the mushroom coffee brand Four Sigmatic. Agrawal’s motivation came from the birth of her son Hiro.
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She was shocked by the amount of diaper waste and wanted to develop a diaper that was less harmful to the environment. That’s when she met Isokauppila, a Finnish entrepreneur who had a life-time fascination with fungi.
This interest led Isokauppila to look at fungi as a way to help solve the crisis of single-use plastics and their harmful impact on the planet. Mushrooms, unlike other plants, do not use photosynthesis and need an external food source to create energy.
Around 15 years ago, a group of Yale students discovered the first plastic-eating fungi in the Amazon. “My guess is that with so much plastic in our environment, fungi needs food, and plastic is fairly similar structurally to other materials [like wood] it has consumed in the past,” Isokauppila told Fast Company. It also makes sense to use fungi to break down and consume plastic waste from disposable diapers.
Hiro Diapers
These innovative diapers look and feel like other diapers on the market, according to Yanko Design, are hypoallergenic and are leakproof for up to 12 hours. What’s different is the fungi pouch that comes with the diapers.
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The concept is simple, once the diaper has been used, just place it in the pouch, throw it away, and in a few weeks, it will decompose in the landfill.
But diapers are just the start. According to Fast Company, Isokauppila wants to normalize the use of fungi to break down other commonly used single-use plastics. But first this technology has to be scaled up.
“If we can break down a diaper, we can break down anything,” he told Fast Company. “Once we’ve gained enough market share, we can partner with other brands and bring this technology to the world.”
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