To Marlene Sandberg, “changing diapers” means something different from just putting a clean Huggies on baby. Sandberg, who is Swedish, is working to change not just individual diapers but the whole product. In the mid-1990s, after reading that every Swedish baby produces a half-ton of dirty diapers per year (which then persists in landfills long past when the baby has babies of its own), she left her job as a corporate lawyer to invent an environmentally friendly diaper. Now the company she founded, Naty AB, is making tentative inroads into a highly competitive field, where woman are (oddly) scarce and the competition is entrenched. Her Nature Boy & Girl diapers are more than 70 percent biodegradable, and they are made with less plastic and other synthetics than regular diapers. Some environmentalists have praised her product, while others still have concerns. Cloth-diaper advocate Maeve Murphy of the London-based Women’s Environmental Network said, “[T]his is still a single-use product that gets thrown away, and as such, it’s a waste of resources.”
