The Diaper Genie

Parenthood raises troubling questions. Am I doing what I can to make the world a better place for my child? Am I setting a good example through morally sound behavior and rational decision-making? What am I going to do with all these poopy diapers?

Like so many contemporary ills, the diaper dilemma is a fairly recent invention. At the dawn of human history, free-range babies eliminated the same way they did everything else: naked and unashamed on God's green earth. In days of less stringent personal hygiene, a separate garment dedicated solely to No. 1 and No. 2 would have seemed laughable. On the pioneer trail, a single nappy was made to last all the way from St. Joseph to Frisco. But modernism brings its discontents, and rising olfactory standards over the past century have driven the search for a better way to transport the payload from the loading dock to some distant destination.

Diaper technology has come a long way. A few holdouts and hippies still insist on cloth, but the rest of us have better things to do than grapple with fasteners, wraps and leaky bottoms, not to mention wooden spoons; for us, the retail offerings are marvelous indeed. Today's disposables are fortified with a high-tech gel that absorbs moisture almost before it leaves the baby. A seemingly unlimited capacity lets parents go hours and hours between pit stops; really, it's only when nonliquids are involved that you have to knuckle down and make a change. By convention, Huggies are for boys, Pampers for girls. Hold your fire, gender stereotype cops — this is for purely practical reasons. Pampers on a boy will leak on you, even if you remember to aim him down.

But the diaper is only the beginning. It's when you dispose of it that the real magic happens. Enter the Playtex Diaper Genie. Like its mystical namesake, the Diaper Genie wields the power to make diapers vanish in the wink of an eye, never to be seen — or smelled — again. (I think it's safe to assume that this is how a genie would deal with them).

The Diaper Genie's workings are elegantly simple. The chassis consists of a white plastic cylinder suggestive of an oversized countertop coffee dispenser. When you want to make a deposit, you open a hinged lid to reveal the puckered sphincter of a white plastic sleeve knotted from the other side. As you shove the folded diaper downward, more plastic is fed from a circular cartridge in the Diaper Genie's throat, allowing your hand to descend into its maw. A few inches down, the diaper engages with a series of baffles designed to hold it in place. Now — this is the beauty part — you rotate the collar within which the plastic bag feeder is housed, twisting newly fed plastic sleeve over the diaper to seal it beneath another, newly formed sphincter that waits in turn for the next round. Fold — push — spin — problem solved.

As far as servicing goes, the Diaper Genie needs only to be refilled and emptied. Regarding the former, the device is plagued with a design flaw: Unlike cash register tape, which forewarns of its depletion with a red stripe along one side, the Diaper Genie's plastic runs out abruptly mid-use, so that the user's arm plunges suddenly into the void. If you're lucky, there is just enough sleeve left to tie off the last diaper you inserted; this is not always the case. Either way, replacing the cartridge is a simple matter and you're soon back in business.

When the Diaper Genie is full, a dial on the top of the lid comes into play. Pressed and rotated, the dial lowers a cutting blade to slice free the plastic sleeve, which has been given a few extra twists for good measure. The Diaper Genie is then inverted and opened at the base to reveal a bounty of individually wrapped installments like a string of pearls or sausages. This cargo is dumped into a plastic bag and taken outside, where the super will bundle it with other trash in a larger plastic bag and take it to the curb, and then off it goes to the landfill.

This brings us to another benefit of the Diaper Genie. Landfills generally smell, due in no small part to the ever-growing proportion of diapers they contain. Worse still, the methane gas they generate is highly flammable, and can easily be ignited by a crushed-underfoot cigarette in the event the landfill is redeveloped into a park or amphitheater. But not with the Diaper Genie on the job — no gases will escape his charges, which will remain more secure than nuclear waste in Nevada for years to come. Civilizations will fall, rise and fall again, and your child's precious poo-poos will remain inviolate. In some distant era, they could provide fossil fuel in bite-size capsules for futuristic personal transportation devices, or strands of delicate white jewels to be worn with black cocktail dresses.

Such cheery scenarios provide welcome if fleeting refuge from the nagging environmentalist qualms that can accompany the Diaper Genie's use. So much plastic, a thousand little sins against nature … but who among us is so pure? If a family eats organic, recycles empties by the dozen, votes regularly and smiles at every last Greenpeace clipboarder, can't it be forgiven for a single little expediency? For all we know, the time saved and comfort gained through the Diaper Genie are just enough to make the difference between kind, loving parents and cranky, scarring parents — a little nonbiodegradable waste is a small price to pay. The boy would understand.

— J. Daniel Janzen (dan at clownyard dot com)