Cycle helmets to be made from recycled nappies. This has got to be one of the most unlikely headlines you’ll ever see, along with “Freddie Starr ate my hamster”.

It can’t be true, can it? And if so, who the hell thought of this? Will we stop buying bike helmets if we think they may be made from nappies?

But, before we get carried away, what are helmets made from at the moment? Well, most helmet liners are currently made from expanded polystyrene foam. Newer designs use similar foams and the top bit – the shell - is usually PET plastic – the same stuff in drinks bottles.

So the bulk of the helmet is not recycled or recyclable.

Naturally, hearing that bike helmets are going to be made from nappies is particularly attention-grabbing to me at the moment. This is because I have an eight month old baby who’s using a combination of the nappy scheme (washable nappies are picked up and washed by someone else – phew!) and biodegradable nappies.

Although my daughter’s using biodegradable nappies they still take ages to break down. I was interested to see that a company in Birmingham is looking to recycle some of the 2.8 billion standard-style nappies used in Britain every year.

At the moment, these mostly end up in landfill to break down in, oh, a couple of thousand years or something. Let’s face it, future archaeologists are not going to have much fun trawling through the waste that we create today.

Nappies contain plastic, fibres, cellulose and polymers. All of these things can be recycled into something else.

The recycling company in Birmingham is not only going to create some much-needed jobs in the Midlands but will take 36,000 tonnes of nappies and turn them into plastic which can then be made into not only bike helmets, but also roof tiles, shoe insoles and biodegradable plant pots as well as a myriad of other things.

As lots of the world’s bike helmets (like everything else) are made in China, it’s a nice thought that we’ll be upping the ante over here.

So does this mean we can start leaving dirty nappies in our recycling box? NO. Not yet, anyhow, but if so, hopefully there’ll be a separate box for them, part of the local council door to door recycling – and hopefully as far from the houses as possible.

Or, in the future we may be able to take nappies to a recycling point at a supermarket car park. The nappies that are being recycled so far are taken from nurseries and care homes. Luckily, the pulp is all sanitised and washed before making into plastic pellets which can then be made into further plastic products.

The recycling company is hoping to go further still than just plain plastic recycling. They are also hoping to extract the methane from these nappies and sell this to the National Grid (seriously!) They hope to start doing this within two years.

Well, recycling nappies has got to be a good thing and I’m sure we won’t be able to tell the difference between a nappy-based bike helmet and a non-recycled bike helmet.

So why not? Better than another landfill site or incinerator trashing our gorgeous county.

onyerbike@oxfordmail.co.uk