Some carbon removal stories are about gigawatt-scale DAC facilities and billion-dollar government contracts. This one is about dirty diapers. And it might be the most creative CDR approach I’ve covered yet.
The Diaper Problem
Disposable diapers are the third-largest consumer item in US landfills. That’s staggering when you think about what’s ahead of them (food waste and paper products). Each conventional disposable diaper — made from a cocktail of sodium polyacrylate, polyethylene plastics, and wood pulp — can take up to 500 years to degrade. While it slowly decomposes, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas roughly 80 times more potent than CO₂ over 20 years.
The average baby goes through about 6,000 diapers before potty training. In the US alone, roughly 20 billion diapers hit landfills every year. That’s about 3.5 million tonnes of waste annually. It’s an enormous, stinking problem that most people would rather not think about.
Diaper Stork’s Solution
Carrie Pollak runs Diaper Stork out of Seattle. The company started as a cloth diaper subscription service — clean diapers delivered, dirty ones picked up, washed, and returned. Simple circular model.
But Pollak wanted broader impact. She acquired Boo, a company making compostable diapers from bamboo, and then did something nobody in Washington State had done before: she set up a process to pyrolyze used diapers into biochar.
Here’s how it works:
- Customers subscribe to bamboo-based compostable diapers
- Used diapers are collected through the existing pickup service
- Pyrolysis heats the organic material to 900°F+ in an oxygen-deprived environment
- Pathogens are killed by the extreme heat
- The output is biochar — a stable, carbon-rich material that can persist in soil for centuries
Over 3 million diapers have been diverted from landfills so far.
The Carbon Removal Angle
This isn’t just waste diversion. It’s genuinely carbon removal — if you follow the carbon.
The bamboo diapers are plant-based. Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth, pulling CO₂ from the atmosphere as it grows. When you turn bamboo-based material into biochar through pyrolysis, you’re converting atmospheric carbon into a solid form that resists decomposition for hundreds to thousands of years (Frontiers in Soil Science, 2024).
Compare the alternatives:
- Landfill: Diapers decompose over centuries, releasing methane → net climate harm
- Incineration: Fast decomposition, CO₂ released immediately → climate neutral at best
- Biochar from pyrolysis: Carbon locked in stable form for centuries → net climate benefit
The biochar itself has further uses. Applied to soil, it improves water retention, nutrient availability, and microbial activity. Research suggests it could eventually replace some synthetic fertilizers — which themselves are a significant source of N₂O emissions (another potent greenhouse gas).
The Market
Plant-based diapers hit $1.42 billion in market value in 2024, with projections reaching $3.52 billion by 2033. That’s a small fraction of the overall $70+ billion diaper market, but the growth rate — roughly 10% annually — signals where consumer preferences are heading.
An open question raised by the original source: is Diaper Stork generating carbon credits from this process? If the biochar production can be quantified and verified — tonnes of CO₂ permanently stored, measured against the counterfactual of landfill decomposition — there’s a real revenue stream waiting.
Puro.earth already certifies biochar-based carbon removal credits. The methodology exists. The question is whether a small diaper company can navigate the certification process cost-effectively.
Not Every Climate Solution Needs to Be High-Tech
There’s a lesson here that the CDR field sometimes forgets. We spend a lot of time — rightly — talking about DAC facilities, enhanced weathering field trials, and ocean alkalinity enhancement pilots. These are critical technologies that need massive scale-up.
But carbon removal also happens in unexpected places. A subscription diaper service in Seattle, pyrolyzing bamboo nappies into biochar. It’s not going to move the gigatonne needle by itself. But it demonstrates something important: CDR can be woven into existing supply chains, existing consumer products, existing waste streams. It doesn’t always need a moonshot.
The circular economy and carbon removal aren’t separate ideas. They’re the same idea, applied at different points in the carbon cycle. When you close a loop and lock away carbon, you get climate benefit twice.
Source: Reasons to Be Cheerful, March 13, 2026. Via @GreenFire on Mastodon.