Towards a greener Sahara: Part 3

Away in a manger no crib for a bed. The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.

It seems to me at Christmas we enjoy talking about how Jesus didn’t have a proper cot or crib and had to lie on straw, but we don’t often mention his other needs such as food and nappies. Why not?  After all they are also part of a babies basic needs.

Thinking about this an article in the BMJ caught our eye this week as we catch up on back issues whilst in the capital -Support breast feeding and the environment.

Most of the talk about breast milk vs bottle feeding concentrates on the value of breast milk and the risks of bottle feeding. WHO estimates around 800,000 children under 5 die world-wide per year as a result of bottle feeding. A few days ago I had a message from Bardai telling me that one of our cleaners at the hospital had lost her baby after it was initially admitted with diarrhoea and dehydration and the family decided to take it to Libya for care. Almost all Teda women bottle feed and we spend a lot of our time dealing with diarrhoea as a result of poor hygiene. The bottles have an offensive smell of sour cheese, they are so dirty. Breast feeding is so much easier than sterilising bottles and much cheaper.

But now it looks like we have another reason to encourage breast feeding. The environmental effect of breast feeding we can assume is small as it uses few resources and produces minimal waste. When it comes to formula feeding let’s start with the milk. The water footprint to make one kg of powdered milk is an incredible 4700l and we shouldn’t forget the methane produced by the cows giving the milk (methane of course trapping heat in the atmosphere 30 x more than C02). Cows milk alone is not nutritionally adequate, so palm oil, coconut oil, fish oils and minerals are added, only adding to the environmental costs of production. Interestingly only 40-50 processing plants exist worldwide, so imagine the food miles transporting the raw ingredients and then distributing the milk world-wide. Once the milk is finished we have to consider what to do with the 86,000 tonnes of metal and the 364,000 tonnes of paper left -land fill is the usual option. These figures are from 2009 and apparently use of formula has doubled since then. So it looks like formula milk is not a very eco-friendly option and that’s before we start thinking about buying and making bottles and sterilising them and heating water for the milk. In the UK alone estimates of the carbon emissions savings gained by breast feeding instead of bottle are the equivalent of taking 50 000 to 77 500 cars off the road per year.

We can safely assume that Jesus was breast fed and Mary and Joseph didn’t have to worry about such issues. Unlike the 78 million children who are not breast fed in the world, the 76% of children not being  exclusively breast fed at 6 weeks in the UK and of course our Teda friends.

What about the other end of the baby. There has been a lot of discussion about cloth versus disposable nappies and the fact that using both electricity and hot water to wash and dry cotton nappies makes them less eco-friendly than you would imagine. Washing at lower temperatures and line drying would clearly reduce their impact. However this is far from the only consideration, for a start nappies have to be transported around and obviously you need a lot more miles to transport disposable ones than cotton! Then they have to be disposed of; in the UK estimates are that they make 2-3% of land fill as they slowly disappear.

Things begin to look even less ecological when you start to consider production; it takes 3 times more energy, 20 more raw materials and 2 times more water to make a disposable nappy compared to a reusable one.

Sadly Bardai doesn’t do too well. Although where we live most clothes are washed by hand using no electricity and dried on the line ( easy when it doesn’t rain) all of which should make the cloth option even better. However most of our Teda friends use disposable nappies and they are disposed of just about anywhere, with no concern for hygiene and waiting for the next 500 years to pass before they disappear. All the other problems apply too , they have to be brought to Bardai in trucks across the desert and of course they have to be manufactured as well. It could be time for some interesting conversations.

Let’s get back to Christmas, I guess Mary didn’t have the luxury of nappies in any form and must have used some eco-friendly extra swaddling for Jesus and that’s not so uncommon in Chad either, it can be disconcerting to end up wet when giving a baby a cuddle!

So after all this cheerful information what next? May be this year as we celebrate the birth of this special baby it might be the moment to start thinking and working out what you can do to make a difference to protect this beautiful world we have been given.

Happy Christmas and many blessings for an environmentally friendly New Year