NORTH Yorkshire County Council is to lobby the Government in an effort to reduce the use of disposable nappies.
The council's executive committee is to be urged to write to Health Secretary John Reid to find out if the cost to the National Health Service of using cloth nappies instead of disposables has been examined.
Collecting and disposing nappies costs taxpayers in North Yorkshire about £230,000 a year.
An estimated 6,600 tonnes of disposable nappies from across the county ends up as landfill.
Writing to the Government is one of a raft of ideas under consideration on how to reduce the use of disposables.
Other ideas include working with NHS trusts, hospitals and other health care organisations to ensure parents and parents-to-be receive advice and information to enable them to choose which type of nappy to use - and to ensure that there is a choice available on maternity wards.
Coun Rob Broadley has called on the county council to press for an end to the practice of including only disposable nappies in "new parent packs" given out free by hospitals.
He said the NHS is partly to blame for not giving parents enough information about cloth nappies, and disposables are being promoted by default on many wards.
A report to the executive says that the use of disposable nappies in maternity wards results in disposal costs that fall on the NHS, as the used nappies are disposed of as waste.
It adds that a key factor encouraging parents to use cloth nappies is the availability of a laundering service.
A campaign to promote the use of cloth nappies in North Yorkshire was launched in March 2003 and is still going.
The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has a target of converting 155,000 households to cloth nappies by April 2006.
Disposable nappies make up three per cent of the total domestic waste collected each year, which can take several hundred years to decompose in landfill sites.
The committee will meet on Tuesday at County Hall, Northallerton, to vote on the recommendation.
Updated: 08:35 Thursday, July 01, 2004
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