Disposable nappies have long been recognised as an environmental disaster, but to compound the problem, the period of time we’re keeping our children in them is increasing. If you’re struggling to potty train your toddler, ‘don’t worry’, says the NHS website, ‘15 per cent of children are not potty trained at three and four per cent are still not trained at the age of four’. Yet this ever-growing nappy mountain now equates to as much as four per cent of our residual waste stream, and we live with the fact that it is likely to outlive the Maldives, Westminster Abbey and the pyramids.

However, a growing number of parents are rejecting nappies altogether in favour of a technique used before the dawn of plastic, or indeed the washing machine, and which is the method still used in the majority of the world today.

‘Elimination communication’ (EC), ‘infant toilet training’ or ‘nappy free’ are just some of the names given to this approach, the theory of which, according to Christine Gross-Loh’s book, The Diaper Free Baby, is that your child is not born wanting to go to the toilet in his or her nappy. In fact, she argues, this is something we train them to do, then a few years later we desperately try to un-train them. So with EC, we learn to read our newborn’s toilet cues, whilst remaining aware of their patterns (many babies will, for example, go straight after waking), and then offer them the chance to go in a potty instead of their nappy. By making an associated noise, such as a ‘pssss’ sound, the carer can then communicate back to the child, so encouraging them to go at these regular times.

Environmental consultant and mother of one, Emma-Louise Hardman’s experience backs up the theory: “Hetty never liked going in her nappy, and she always told us when she needed to go, but if I hadn’t heard about EC from a friend… I would never have known to interpret those cries – otherwise I would probably have done what everyone did and persevered with nappy wearing.”

EC is – as those who practice it argue – a non-coercive approach, where the onus is on the parent, rather than the child. Furthermore, Gross-Loh tells us that: ‘EC can be as simple as offering your baby a chance to use the toilet once a day, when her diaper happens to be off, or as intensive as aiming to catch a majority of your baby’s output.’

Hardman, who now ‘catches’ over half of her four-month-old baby’s eliminations in various receptacles, including one top-hat style potty that she holds between her legs while baby Hetty is on her lap, confesses that “at the moment, it’s more time consuming”. However, she tells me that she regularly speaks to people on the UK support forum, www.bornready.co.uk, who have practiced both traditional potty training and EC, all of whom say it’s no more or less work in the long run, just that it’s spread out, gentler and happens earlier.

So Hetty is kept in training pants or reusables throughout the day, with trousers replaced by leg warmers for easy access, and whenever she gives her mum the cue, she’s popped onto a potty and away she goes! This method can, Hardman says, be practiced without any nappies at all, but the majority of parents opt to keep their babies in reusables as backup. These allow babies to remain aware of their elimination habits, unlike their hyper-effective disposable counterparts.

And the benefits aren’t purely environmental. In addition there are substantial financial savings to be had (a family could easily spend upwards of £700 on disposables for one child, while the sparsely-populated county of Lincolnshire alone spends £500,000 a year landfilling nappies).

So perhaps it’s now time for this fresh approach to reducing the nappy mountain – could there be any local authorities brave enough to promote it?