One Baby No-Brainer: Cloth Diapers

There is one obvious choice you can make as a mom that will cut your family's garbage output in half and keep you from, literally, throwing your money away: use cloth diapers. With their waterproof outer shells and variety of systems, they are no longer your mother's cloth diapers.  Read on for why it makes a lot of sense (and cents!) to avoid disposables and how to get started!

 Photo Credits: bumgenius.com

Environmental, Health, and Cost Benefits

The absolute best source I've found for facts on cloth diapering is the Real Diaper Association's Diaper Facts.  Copyrighted, so I can't reproduce them here, but read this quickly and you'll understand why cloth diapers look so good to an eco-minded mom.

It is estimated that one kid uses around 8,000 disposable diapers in its lifetime.  No disposable diapers have ever fully biodegraded since they were invented, as scientists think it will take between 250-500 years for one diaper to decompose.  If a new generation comes along every 30 years, that means your kids' first diaper will not decompose until their great, great, great, great, great grandchild is 10 years old, at the earliest.  As you're waiting for that one diaper to decompose, the rest of the world is adding between 18 & 27 billion (estimates vary) diapers to your landfill each year.

On top of the issue of plastic waste, there are other ingredients that go into a disposable diaper such a wood pulp (an estimated 250,000 trees per year) and some ingredients that are known carcinogens, such as Dioxin and Tributyl-Tin.  Granted, companies do a pretty good job of removing these carcinogens once they're found, but that doesn't help the moms that have used these diapers up to that point.  On the flipside, natural clothing (i.e. cloth not saturated in added chemicals) has never been found to cause issues.  Cloth is cloth and we've been using it safely for thousands of years!

If the environment and health aren't enough, consider the costs.  You have an initial investment of between $400 & $800 for cloth diapers.  You also have the ongoing costs of water and electricity to clean these diapers.  Given that you'll use more disposables than cloth diapers over the lifetime of each child (8,000 vs. 5-6,000 - due to the fact that children using cloth can feel they are wet and potty-train more quickly), I've seen savings quotes of between $1500-$2000 per child.  That's significant.

There are plenty of naysayers out there and plenty of reasons to be scared of cloth diapers.  However, make sure you have the facts.

Information & Facts on Cloth Diapering

Why should you believe a bunch of stupid websites with facts (many of which don't have sources to back them up) declaring that cloth diapering is amazing?  I'm not sure I do, but the people I do believe are the moms out there doing it!

If you have any questions about anything cloth diaper-related, I highly recommend visiting the BabyCenter's Cloth Diapering Forum, which has almost 7,000 members.  It is by far one of the more active forums I participate in!  What's more, it's encouraging to hear what works, what doesn't, and what's true from real moms in the trenches.

For an overview of the myths and facts on cloth diapering, visit The Diaper Jungle's Cloth Diaper Myths page.

One of the top complaints about cloth diapering is its laundry aspect.  If you have 36 cloth diapers on hand, you'll end up doing laundry every three days with a full load.  In the mean time you shake off the solids and throw the diapers into a pail to wait for laundry day, when you can just throw them into the washing machine.  It doesn't sound too bad, but an alternative would be using a diaper service - someone that comes to pick up your dirty diapers, cleans them, and drops off clean ones.  To locate a diaper service near you, check out the National Association of Diaper Services website.

Types & Brands

This discussion will be a future post in and of itself, but here are the basics.

There are a lot of websites out there that will give you an overview of the types of cloth diapers available, such as this one from EarthEasy.com.  However, I found the choices and explanations really, really confusing while first investigating cloth diapering.  What I really wanted was a demonstration!

My top suggestion for beginners: Canada's Diaper Ladies offers a free DVD on cloth diapering that includes diapering and laundering demonstrations (on dolls) and information about different brands.  While they are selling their own set of cloth diapers, I found the sales pitch easy enough to peel away and I walked away finally feeling like I understood cloth diapering!

Future Posts

In the next post, I'll go into details on the different types and brands of cloth diapers available, plus what I've decided to try.  When the baby comes, I will be keeping detailed notes about my costs, how many times I wash, which brands I like best, etc, so stay tuned!