ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 20, 1996 TAG: 9612200021
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOSTON
SOURCE: Associated Press
When the Dydee Diaper Service started in 1933, new parents had two options: roll up their sleeves and wash out the dirty diapers, or pay someone else to do it.
After 63 years, Dydee is spinning and drying its last batch of cloth diapers this week. A decade after a surge in business from environmentally aware yuppies, the nation's second-oldest diaper service is folding up, a victim of Pampers and other plastic disposables.
``We're just dealing with the fact that people don't use cloth diapers anymore,'' said Steven Landry, Dydee's president. ``It's our first generation of new parents who, when they were baby-sitting, when they were little, used disposable.''
Boston-based Dydee is not alone. Membership in the National Association of Diaper Services has dropped from 250 in the booming early 1990s to about 100, executive director John Shiffert said.
Many cloth diaper companies sprang up in the late 1980s to ride an environmental groundswell. Young parents were returning to the cotton variety their parents had used on them.
``For a while, disposable diapers were really a symbol of wasteful society,'' Landry said.
But the movement quickly faded.
Dydee, for example, dropped from 11,000 customers in 1990 to 1,000 today. The truck fleet shriveled from 18 to four, and the number of employees fell from 100 to 20.
Shiffert said the decline in customers was primarily caused by aggressive marketing by disposable diaper manufacturers, which criticized reusable diapers for wasting water to wash and re-wash the supplies.
``Our feeling is that the brainwashed disposable customers now said, `Well, I don't need to worry about the environmental part of it. I have an excuse to use the disposables,''' Shiffert said.
About 90 percent of the some 18 billion diapers used in this country each year are disposables. But cloth users are a loyal bunch.
Kathryn Anderson chose cotton diapers for her 6-month-old, Suzanna, because she thought they were better for the environment and for her baby.
``When she was first born, she just seemed so fresh and so perfect. It felt not only bad for the environment but also strange to put something so plastic on such a cute, natural, little perfect body,'' she said.
LENGTH: Medium: 51 linesby CNB