Products for incontinent adults help them stay home longer

SANTA CRUZ, Calif.

Peggy Lu Fay spent years visiting nursing homes, where she met many patients who were forced to leave their homes for only one reason: Their loved ones simply couldn't handle caring for them after they became incontinent.

It was a heartbreaking scenario that led Fay to search for a way to help. She started selling adult reusable diapers that were cheap, environmentally friendly and custom made to make it easier for caretakers.

"Couples who are married 50 or 60 years are pulled apart and separated at the end of their lives," said Fay, a former nurse. "This gives them what they need to stay home."

Santa Cruz County awarded Fay a $20,000 grant last January to manufacture her own cloth diapers, complete with a laundering service. Inside the nondescript green warehouse that doubles as a showroom, she has an array of fabrics, prints and sizes to fit everyone, including babies.

Von Wilmot discovered Fay's Life Styles Emporium and asked her to design something that would comfortably fit her husband's large size and absorb nighttime accidents. The couple came in for a fitting, and after a few alterations ended up with a personally designed cloth diaper complete with thick layers that fold together to form several inches of padding.

"They're wonderful. It was just sort of magic," Wilmot said. "It was about keeping him dry at night, not having to throw out stuff and not having to pay out money all of the time."

And saving is really the reason Santa Cruz County got involved. A fully incontinent adult contributes about a ton of waste to the landfill each year, said Jeffrey Smedberg, the county's recycling programs coordinator.

"We had a lot to learn about adult diapers, and, in a sense, they may be even more of an impact on landfills than baby diapers," he said. "Once people need to start using them, it could be years and years and they're still using them."

The concept is catching on elsewhere. In November, officials in Santa Clarita announced a six-month pilot project that will involve 500 families putting disposable baby diapers on the curb to be recycled.

The materials will be reused in nonfood packaging and products such as wallpaper, plastic decking, even shoe insoles.

"This is the first city in the nation that has done this," said Fiona Hutton of Knowaste, the New York-based company behind the pilot program. "Not too many years ago there was no bottle or aluminum recycling. They've done a great job with those items. It's really easy to recycle, and city and county leaders have to look to the next step."

Knowaste has a major diaper recycling plant in the Arnhem, Holland, that processes 100,000 tons of diapers each year, much of which consists of adult diapers from nursing homes and hospitals.

Cost effective

And while that's important to Fay and her four co-workers, it's just one of many reasons people come to her. Cloth diapers cost about $30 to $60 apiece, but they're good for about 300 washes. That compares to disposable diapers, which can cost $1.25 apiece for a bag of 40-45.

But disposable diapers do have their place, and some say cloth contributes to more skin irritations, especially rashes.

"Older people who tend to be on a fixed income are trying to get by on less than more," said Nancy Muller, executive director of the Spartanburg, S.C.-based National Association For Continence. "They don't change the garments often enough or they stuff reusable towels in there and then they end up with skin problems."

But Muller said she's happy the subject is at least starting to be discussed more openly. Many adults are so ashamed of their incontinence problems, she said, they end up locking themselves away at home far from society.

And it's not just older folks. Many young women experience some type of leakage after giving birth and require some type of absorbency product, along with men and women suffering from spinal injuries or diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

But Fay said Life Styles Emporium also caters to those younger clients. The company makes everything from bright colors with lace ruffles, such as lime green and lemon yellow, to leopard print bikinis.

One young woman in a wheelchair came into the showroom with her mother and just started crying as she looked at the different products available.

"She said, 'I had no idea anyone would think to make anything like that for someone like me,'" Fay recalled. "It makes you feel like what you're doing is worthwhile."