Is Your Business Family Friendly? Part 2 Nappy Waste Disposal

For customer facing business throughout the UK, it’s quite normal to provide public toilets and washroom facilities. Retailers aim to keep consumers in their premises; should a potential customer have to leave to use the toilet, they may not return. For bars and restaurants with drinks licences, providing public toilets is the law. However, whilst it is the norm for commercial businesses to provide washroom facilities, there are still many businesses that don’t provide baby changing facilities.

This leads to the question: Is your business baby friendly? If you are public facing, baby changing facilities are essential. Even if you do provide a baby changing unit and nappy disposal facilities, it’s important to consider if these facilities are provided for fathers as well as mothers. An inclusive business is a family friendly business.

To help make life easier for parents in your public washroom, there are two key facilities that are vital: Baby changing units (which we looked at in “Is Your Business Family Friendly? Part 1 – Baby Changing Facilities”) and nappy disposal bins.

If the facilities are provided to change your baby’s nappy in a public washroom, it’s also important to provide a means of disposing of the soiled nappy. No parent wants to carry around a dirty nappy until they can dispose of it elsewhere, so facilities should be available to do so alongside a baby change unit.

Legislation for human hygiene waste

Whilst waste from nappies is considered non-hazardous, in large quantities, as can be the case for many businesses, nappy waste can be offensive and cause handling problems when it comes to properly disposing of it. For a busy business with baby changing units, a specialist nappy disposal bin is usually required. When one standard bag or container of human hygiene waste is generated over the usual refuse collection interval, it’s considered appropriate to package it away from other waste.

Whilst there may be a worry that providing nappy disposal facilities in a public washroom would lead to trouble with odours and hygiene problems for other people using the washroom, nappy disposal bins help to prevent these problems. Holding as much as 65 litre capacity, a nappy disposal bin features an airtight top fitting with a chuted lid for discretion and maximum hygiene, keeping germs away from the public.

If your business’s public washrooms are in need of an upgrade to make them more family friendly, visit sphygiene.co.uk or call us today on 0113 245 8157 and our team will be on hand to advise you.