Kickstart: Can a startup get parents to ditch disposal diapers?

Add me to the "I doubt it" column on this, but a New York company thinks that parents are ready to leave disposable diapers behind.

Diaperkind is a cotton diaper service similar to those some families have used to launder cotton diapers. Its owners have now launched Esembly, which will deliver a complete kit of diapers, covers, creams and even laundry soap to parents seeking an alternative to disposables.

According to a 2014 Procter & Gamble study, only 10 percent of people who start with cotton diapers stick with them. Diaperkind is similar to other diaper services, collecting and washing cotton diapers.

Esembly believes, though, that future generations will shun disposables.

"By the time Gen Z has babies, they won't even consider using a diaper for one to three hours and then tossing it in a landfill to sit for hundreds of years," Liz Turrigiano, co-owner of Diaperkind and Esembly, a cloth- diaper company, told Crain's New York Business, a sister publication of Plastics News.

But switching comes with some big costs upfront.

"All the supplies needed to diaper a baby have an upfront price tag of about $550," Crain's New York writes. "That's more than 10 times the $50 new parents would spend on disposable diapers for the first month but much less than the thousands they'd shell out for disposables over the course of their child's diaper-wearing years."

Steve Toloken is in Tennessee this week, covering the Plastics Recycling Conference and Trade Show. The plastics recycling industry has gone through some major changes in the past few years since China enacted its National Sword policy.

But Steve says one United Nations official predicts bigger changes are on the way. The U.N.'s Basel Convention, which kicks in Jan. 1, 2021, is designed to look at the entire global recycling industry, not just the section affecting China. Rolph Payet, the head of the United Nations organization that administers the convention, said it is designed to build a global system that will keep more recycling of plastic scrap in the countries where it is created.

"It means more responsibility on countries to manage their own waste instead of transferring it to another country," Payet said. "That's a big issue with respect to the problems of plastics that we have."

I suppose the students and faculty at Muskegon Community College in Michigan were just being cautious when they alerted school officials that they saw an alligator in a creek in the middle of campus.

After all, the creek was partially frozen. There was snow on the ground. And it was, again, Michigan. In February.

Still, as Kristina Broughton, the college's social media coordinator, told MLive: "I started getting text messages saying, 'There's an alligator in the creek in the middle of campus,' so I went to go investigate."

As you can probably guess by now, the alligator was plastic. Specifically a large plastic — but very realistic, Broughton maintains — head.

The school fished it out, and the head is now stored safely away in a closet.

But at least it was "a good laugh in the middle of the semester," Broughton said.