SOLUTION: The Case of the Disposable Diaper Market

Estimate the size of the disposable diaper market.

First, I’m going to assume that there are 320 million Americans. I’m going to further assume that the average life expectancy of an American is 80 years. I’m also going to assume that there are even numbers of people in each age group. And that there are exactly same numbers of 8 year-olds as 68 year-olds.

You divide 320 million by 80 and you get about 4 million people per age group. Children wear diapers from ago zero to 3 so that’s 9.9 million kids wearing diapers. So we’ll round it off to 10 million kids. You said disposable diapers. So I’ll estimate that 80 percent of children wear disposable diapers. (I know that it is probably closer to 95%, but 80 is a much easier number to use than 95). So now we’re talking 8 million children wearing 5 diapers a day. That’s 40 million diapers a day times 365 equals approximately 14.6 billion diapers a year.

Leave a Reply