I was thinking more about Christo’s latest work in Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake featuring 7,506 pink barrels of oil. That glorious pink structure represents the amount of oil needed to make 5,000,000 nappies.
That may seem like a lot but it isn’t.
Every day in the UK, 8,000,000 nappies are landfilled.
Every.
Day.
Said differently, every day a tad more than Christo’s pink oil barrel barge is extracted from the earth as oil, made into nappies that are used for 3 – 4 hours at a time by just 5% of the population and then buried back into the ground for 500+ years.
Every.
Day.
In the US where 50,000,000 nappies are landfilled every day we need 10 of Christo’s pink oil barrel barges a day to grasp the impact.
In so many ways human beings are awesome but we so suck when it comes to product design and we are just starting to feel the affects of our suckiness (technical term) now.
We can do better.
We will do better.
We have to do better as there’s no other place to call home despite Elon Musk and the Interstellar movie.