About five years ago, Miki Agrawal was sitting in her room on one of her "thinking Fridays," a day the serial entrepreneur gives herself each week, sans calls or meetings, to just exist in the world and "receive downloads from nature," as she puts it. On that particular Friday, she was thinking about diapers—a subject that's top of mind for most new parents, but Agrawal, as they say, is not a regular mom.
By that point, she estimated that her toddler son, Hiro, had gone through thousands of disposable diapers, contributing to the roughly 20 billion sent to landfills and incinerators in the United States each year. She also knew that each one took 500 years to break down. "I tried cloth diapers—no fucking way," says Agrawal, 45. "I tried eco-diapers, but they didn't perform well." As a woman who'd offered her own pumped breast milk to fellow Burning Man attendees to make lattes, she was well aware of its health benefits. "I was like, Wait a minute. If breast milk is liquid gold, baby poop must be fertilizer gold," she says. "Why are we wrapping this potent fertilizer in plastic and not harnessing it for good?"
At that moment, her son appeared and pointed to a book on her nightstand. "He goes, 'Pacha, mama, Pacha!' So I pull out this children's book that has no business being in my room and start reading it to him," she says. In the book, Pacha's Pajamas, a girl named Pacha works with animals to save the planet. "By page 3, he was running off again; he was two. But I kept reading, and on page 31, it said that there were certain types of fungi that eat plastic." All of a sudden, she had her answer: "You can't make that up. It's the universe. I was like, 'I'm listening, I'm listening!'" |
