Green Business: Greenbeans nappies

Ursula Faulkner, 23 months, models a homemade nappy from GreenBeans cloth nappy making kit. Photo / Andrew Bonallack

A new New Zealand nappy supplier is working hard to help the planet and parents by keeping waste out of our landfills.

Owners of company 'GreenBeans', husband and wife team Hamish and Sarah Russ, set out six years ago - after the birth of their first son - to provide New Zealand parents with more choices in modern cloth nappies.

Hamish says before they started trading, other parents in their social circle complained they were being charged exorbitant postage rates for their cloth nappies coming from the US.

The Russ family already has importing experience from their days bringing over wakeboarding equipment from the United States for their Tauranga-based company WakePro. This new venture sees them importing materials for parents to make their own modern cloth nappies.

The fabrics used to produce the nappies include bamboo, hemp, microfiber and suedecloth, which Russ says are difficult to source in New Zealand.

"It's using a lot of technology to pull something together with water proofing material on the outside and something to make sure it doesn't smell like a sewer when you change bubs," he says.

The strategy to sell the materials for sewing nappies relies on stay-at-home mums, who - like him at age 30 - would have learned manual training, which included sewing and cooking, as part of the New Zealand school curriculum.

"They have two hours between feeding bubs and they don't really want to watch Oprah and they don't want to go to their friends' houses everyday," he says.

Russ says the business has grown since early 2008 and in July 2009 the company set up a second warehouse in Brisbane.

He says this has in part been a measure to move more volumes of product to the increasing Australian market; 60 per cent of GreenBeans' business is now for export markets with many sales generated online.

One mother of a young child, Jowairiyya Ben Fayed, says she would struggle to find time to sew and wash fabric diapers. "I know our mums did it and that might make us lazy but we've got a million things to do."

"What puts me off is you continuously have to rinse them but you can't leave them in a pile for the end of the week."

She says her mother recommended using them to save money but she continues using disposables. She would typically change her 14-month-old son's nappy five or six in one day. "They are really expensive and before I know it the packets are already empty," she says.

Russ says these cloth nappies are convenient because they cut down on household waste as they have a lifespan of typically eight years and with each change the only part disposed is a nappy liner.

But he says some of his customers go further than this: "If you're going to stick to the environmental blueprint than you're going to scoop the poo out and flush it down the toilet."