Good for baby, good for the Earth
Everyone who knows me is well aware of my fervent and ongoing lactivism. I have written about the supremacy of breastfeeding every August for the last five years. It might seem like I would eventually run out of fresh material, but it simply can’t happen. The subject is so broad, so deep and so full of political and cultural implications that it’s a bottomless well of topics. This year seems like a good time to talk about breastfeeding and the environment.
For decades, breastfeeding advocates, lactation consultants and La Leche League leaders have been saying “Breastfeeding is good for the environment.” It’s on almost every “top 10 reasons to breastfeed” list I’ve ever seen.
First, there is no discernible negative environmental impact from breastfeeding. It’s an almost perfect system with no by-products to dispose of, no waste, and very few resources used. This can’t be said of feeding artificial baby milk (ABM) from a bottle.
The most obvious effect of ABM feeding on the planet is massive pollution. Our landfills are clogged with empty formula cans, baby bottles and lids, rubber nipples and nipple rings. In this country, there are four million live births per year. About forty percent of our babies are never breastfed. One study estimates that babies fed from a bottle use an average of 12 bottles during their first year. This means that on average, the U.S. consumes and disposes of nearly 20 million baby bottles per year. Each ABM-fed baby needs about two cans of powdered formula per week, for a total of over 167 million cans per year. Just in the United States. That’s a lot of garbage.
But pollution is more than throwing out our used-up stuff. ABM manufacture creates a lot of industrial pollution. Water is polluted with sewage from dairy cows, fertilizers used to grow cattle feed and through the dumping of waste at the manufacturing site. Air is polluted, as the production of ABM requires the milk and additives to be heated and cooled several times.
Natural resources
Those 20 million baby bottles I mentioned are mostly made of plastic, a petroleum product. And as we know, petroleum is a limited resource. Most bottles are not recyclable, which means once we’ve produced the bottle, that petroleum is out of the cycle. Baby bottle nipples are often made from silicon, also not recyclable. Disposable liners require the user to consume even more plastic, as the liners aren’t reusable at all.
Even more petroleum is used as tanker fuel and gasoline. Most of the milk comes to us from third world countries. Once harvested from the cows, it is put on boats and shipped to the U.S. From there, it is trucked to various outlets for sale. Very, very often, it gets shipped back to the third world countries it came from originally.
Then there’s paper. Each year in the U.S., 600 tons of paper is used just to make the labels on the cans of ABM, and it’s estimated that for every 100 cans sold, 50 newspaper or magazine ads, mailers or coupons are produced. And the cans themselves use tin – 43,000 tons of tin annually in the U.S.
Deforestation
Most of the dairy for ABM is produced in clear cut fields that used to be forest or rain forest land. Every two pounds of ABM uses just under 150 sq. ft. of pasture. From an agricultural perspective, it’s inefficient. From a global perspective, it’s hard to justify when there’s a better alternative available, for free, to almost every baby on the planet.
On a smaller scale, ABM use causes even more consumption of wood in less industrialized areas. In many parts of the world, the water to mix with the ABM concentrate and wash and sterilize the bottles is heated over cooking fires. In places where each family spends an hour or two gathering fire wood each day, this not only burns through precious resources, it increases the workload.
The environmental impact of ABM reaches even further into our everyday lives. When women exclusively breastfeed there’s a significant delay in the return of fertility. The same delay means that a woman menstruates fewer times during her lifetime. Fewer periods means less need for tampons and pads – products that also require industrial processes and disposal.
Clean water is needed to mix with ABM concentrate, and more is needed to wash and sterilize the bottles and nipples used to feed ABM. In most of the U.S. we take clean tap water for granted. In many parts of the world, clean water is hard to find and is considered a precious resource.
In the end
“We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.” This is a Native American belief, one that I share. When looked at from an environmental perspective, breastfeeding is the only choice that makes sense for the 95% percent of women who can successfully do it. When you are holding that baby in your arms and wishing you could give him the whole world, remember: You can. Nursing your baby is the first step. VS
