At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival I am looking for the Green messages that are coming across the silver screen. My goal is to learn new things about how to Green my life and about how to get involved in the solutions. I am glad to have found some movies that inspire this.

I met with Min Sook Lee at her home to talk about her new documentary “My Toxic Baby”. There are a lot of important things she investigates in the film about problems with food and toys and how we must be so careful with the products that we expose our children to but perhaps most striking is her sharing of an old idea whose time has probably come back.

Do parents actually need to use diapers? Seems like a strange question. Can babies be taught to get their caregivers attention and then just let them know when they need to go? Can babies just be taken to the washroom and then held in a comfortable position over an ordinary toilet where they can then proceed to do their business? The answer seems to be yes they can and Min Sook proves this in her documentary. This technique is called “Elimination Communication” or EC and is a practice that may be catching on in the mainstream. The terms “elimination communication” or ”natural infant hygiene” were coined by Ingrid Bauer and are used interchangeably in her book, Diaper Free!

With some investigation, Min Sook discovered that this technique has been common around the world – most of the planet’s babies are in fact not in diapers so the problem of disposal is not as universal as one might have thought.

I am struck by the possibility that a lot of diapers could just be ”eliminated” from the waste stream if EC were adpoted by more parents. Of course, Min Sook does not mean that diapers should not be used at all – parents can’t be continually attached to their babies – but certainly there could be less diapers used if this practice were more widespread.