Innovation in a Sustainable Product: gDiapers

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Jason Graham-Nye and Kim Graham-Nye of gDiapers are working to close the loop on diapers.

Portland-based gDiapers has already succeeded in carving out space for environmentally friendly diapers in the multi-billion-dollar diaper industry.

But CEO Jason Graham-Nye said the six-year-old company isn’t stopping there.

The company’s next goal? The fully compostable diaper.

“That’s our next step of innovation,” said Graham-Nye. “It’s closing the loop.”

And closing the loop is more than just a catch-phrase in the diaper world.

Though the statistics vary, it’s widely believed that it takes between 250 years and 500 years for the average disposable diaper to fully biodegrade.

So when Jason and Kim Graham-Nye had their first child nine years ago, they weren’t exactly thrilled with the prospect of adding to the 20 million disposable diapers that find their way to landfills each year.

While the most logical route would have been cloth diapers, Graham-Nye said water restrictions in their native Australia, made that a non-starter.

Then they discovered a company that made biodegradable flushable diapers.

“We loved it so much as customers, we bought the rights to the patents globally outside of Australia and New Zealand,” he said.

The couple set up shop in Portland, saying “America is still the best place for a couple of immigrants to come in with a business plan and get it supported.”

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The company makes a flushable, biodegradable diaper as well as an absorbent, flushable insert worn inside an outer reusable pant. (See the gallery at the top of the story for a look at the product line.) It also has a line of fully compostable wet-ones.

Its diaper inserts — made from microfleece, hemp and cotton — are the first consumer packaged good to be certified as a “Cradle to Cradle” product, meaning everything that goes into them will be reabsorbed positively back into nature.

It’s a big deal for a sustainable company, especially considering the alternative.

According to the Real Diaper Association, a San Diego-based advocate for cloth diapers, more than 300 pounds of wood, 50 pounds of petroleum feedstock and 20 pounds of chlorine are used to make a year’s supply of disposable diapers for a single baby.

Further, the group said typical disposables contain various harmful chemicals, including Tributyl-tin, which it describes as a toxic pollutant known to cause hormonal problems in humans.

The brand launched locally through Portland-based New Seasons Market, expanding into Whole Foods natural groceries and eventually on to Babies R Us stores, which has become one of gDiapers biggest accounts. Online sales through sites such as Amazon.com and Diapers.com have also been a growth catalyst.

Though the 18-person company won’t divulge exact data, Graham-Nye said sales this year have grown 65 percent and the company is profitable.

It’s also tallied a far share of national acclaim.

Within six months of launching the company in 2005, gDiapers made an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show.

More recently, Kim Graham-Nye in September was named to Fortune magazine’s list of the 10 most promising women entrepreneurs, which heralded startups with between $1 million and $25 million in sales that appear poised to become large global businesses.

But its best may be yet to come.

GDiaper’s liners and wet-ones are already fully compostable, and its diapers — if only wet — can be put into home compost bins, Graham-Nye said.

But making the company’s entire product line compostable is a challenge.

“If you have in-vessel composting, which generates heat, composting is just fine,” he said.

The obvious hurdle, however, is not everybody has such a mechanism.

So gDiapers plans to do it for consumers.

“My first step would be to try to do a pilot with a small number of customers and we’d do it ourselves — collection, in-vessel composting — as a trial,” he said.

It’s a big idea, but one he believes could turn diapering your child into something of an “inspirational moment.”

“Imagine if we go back to parents after it’s all said and done and (provide) a couple pounds of usable compost to use in the garden thanks to their own kids,” Graham-Nye said. “There’s something cool about that.”

@ErikSiemers | esiemers@bizjournals.com | 503.219.3418