Diapering

Currently Craving: Green Beans (again)

There's been a lot of talk lately about my diapering choices. Well, and about max's too. and while we haven't made any decisions.... the classic options that we have aren't so hot.

Option 1 Disposable. According to Wikipedia (which i really wish we had when i had to write reports for school) disposable diapers were introduced in the US in 1949 (the year one of my parents was born) and were considered a GREAT invention by parents. Pampers brand were actually introduced in 1961 and that created competition for Huggies brand. the competition led to lower prices and greater innovation in leak protection. The great thing about disposable diapers is that when you take them off the child they then are balled up and thrown away. yay! The difficulty is that they have a huge environmental impact as they are made out of superabsorbant polymers, plastic, and in many cases chlorine, the materials don't exactly break down quickly. not to mention they carry Poo... and that poo often ends up outside of the diaper in the landfill. Wikipedia says an estimated 27.4 billion disposable diapers are used in the US each year, about 3.4 million tons of used diapers in the landfill each year. (just in the US) and if that were the steady rate since 1949... then by the end of next year we'd have about 204 million tons of disposable diapers in our landfills... no sign of stopping.... no biodegrading in the next hundreds of years.

Now. i'm big on convenience. but that i can live without if possible.


Option 2 Cloth. Again Wikipedia. Mass produced cloth diapers have been around since about 1887. In the old days it was a strip of cloth held together with safety pins. Their popularity has declined in the US with the introduction of disposable diapers. They are reusable and can be made of natural materials, man made materials, or a combination of both. If thrown away, most will decompose in a landfill in about 6 months. When you take them off the child they are then much more labor intensive as they must be rinsed and washed to satisfaction and sanitary cleanliness before next use. The washing leads to many more loads of laundry, more energy usage to heat the water and run the washing machine and dryer, more soap into the water, and more water usage.
when i was 8 my sister was born and my mom chose to use cloth on her. why she would choose that option when she already has 3 other children to care for who all used disposable until potty training is beyond me. i don't particularly remember it being labor intensive, but i do remember the diapers themselves being a pain in the butt. that's because 20-some years ago they were still in the dark ages of cloth diapers.... rectangle fabric, two big safety pins, rubber pants over top. i don't remember blow-outs but they must have happened. i'm sure my mom was glad my sister essentially decided to potty train herself very early on.
luckily cloth diapers have VERY much improved since yesteryear. they are much more attractive and much easier to use. My friend kiki did an entire blog on them.. read here and then followed up Here. Thank goodness she did all that work for me

SO with those two options we were thinking. i just can't throw all that waste into the landfill. i can't do it. and if it's just for my own convenience so that this daughter can have a poo-filled world. NO! so Cloth it is.

Until....
enter Option 3: gDiapers I was on celebrity-moms blog and she had this ad for gDiapers which i thought were normal cloth diapers. NOT SO. they are an appealing combination of cloth outerwear with disposable FLUSHABLE!!!! innerwear. If you can't flush it you can toss it in the trash and they biodegrade quickly, you can even COMPOST the wet ones, apparently the nitrogen in the wizz is good for the soil. Apparently they were thought up in Australia during time of drought (not good to wash lots of laundry) and have relatively recently come to the US. I've checked out the website HERE and am kind of sold. the videos are especially good and they show how the whole dispose of the flushable part goes. there is a step with that that involves sort of stirring it in the toilet to be sure you don't get clogged, but i figure i could handle that. The manufactures make a really good point that with these diapers Poo goes in the TOILET which is exactly where it's supposed to go. and if all of this isn't enough... Julia Roberts uses them on her baby. and if it's good enough for Julia Roberts' baby's bum it's darn sure good enough for mine!!!
jokes aside. i thought i could really buy into this... only.... it's online marketing. what if i have the little outer pants but NO INNER LINERS???? crap! that put a cog in the works. but then i looked up their retailers. once again i have completely fallen in love with our local natural foods market. ET carries the inserts. i went there a few days later and even saw them with my own eyes. i actually saw them in the arms of one lady who seemed to be buying the store out of them (and that seemed like and endorsement to me, and maybe competition)

So For now that's what we're thinking will work for us. not quite disposable, not quite cloth... somewhere in the middle. if the relatively new moms would check out the videos and tell me what you think as far as does it seem like a lot of extra work that isn't really worth it, i'd love to read comments.