Little Lancing Day Nursery and Forest School is becoming the very first nursery within the Tops brand to solely use reusable nappies. Plastic nappies bought in from parents will be returned home and any child arriving at the nursery in plastic nappies will be changed into cloth ones at the first nappy change. This bold move supports the Tops family ethos of being as eco-sustainable as possible.
GECCO, a charity organisation run by Cheryl Hadland, Managing Director of Tops Day Nurseries, encourage the behavioural change from plastic to reusable cloth nappies.
“Currently in the UK about 8 million disposable nappies are thrown away each day! Every child will go through up to 6,500 nappy changes before he or she is potty trained and there were 680,000 babies born in England and Wales in 2018; those children alone have the potential to use more than 1.5 billion (billion!) disposable nappies in their first year.” – GECCO website.
https://gecco.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/GECCO_REAL_NAPPIES_Infographic_0519.pdf
Earlier this year GECCO raised funds through a Charity Whisky Auction; the money was invested into the creation of Real Nappy Hampers (each one stocked with approx.. £100 worth of real nappies, wet bags, nappy liners and boosters), which were then distributed to all the Tops Day Nurseries. Each nursery received training on the use of real nappies, and the idea behind the hampers was to allow parents to “trial” the use of real nappies for free with Tops colleagues supporting parents through the process.
Little Lancing has been fitted with two new washing machines to help with the excess laundry, and continuing with the BioVation replacement of non- bio cleaning products in Tops nurseries, Nappy BioWash will be used. This brand new product eliminates the risk of cross-contamination without soaking, which will allow nappies from different babies to be washed at once; this issue has been one of the big blocks in washable nappies in nurseries, as to wash each babies nappies separately is not time-effective nor environmentally friendly. The BioWash product comes in biodegradable white tubs and uses three scoops per 5kg of washing, and can be used alongside the EcoEggs already in use at the nurseries.
Little Lancing will be the flagship nursery trialling the change, with Tops hoping to roll out this scheme in all thirty of their nurseries in due course, and are actively looking for funding to help their project of introducing re-useable nappies in Early Years settings.
