Your Guide To Green

When my husband and I learned we were expecting our first child, our minds reeled with the seemingly huge amount of preparation that was needed for our little bundle of joy. I was consumed by books on breastfeeding and parenting styles and spent hours picking out paint colors and crib bedding. However we neglected to consider, until it was almost an afterthought, the decision that would have the single largest effect on our family's environmental impact - how to diaper our baby! Would it be disposable diapers or cloth diapers - was there even a choice anymore? Which was the truly more environmentally responsible choice?

We weren't quite as enlightened then as we are today but we knew that reusing something is always better than throwing it away. Single-use, throwaway products are filling up our landfills, with disposable diapers representing about 4 percent of solid waste nationwide.1 That translates to more than 25 billion disposable diapers, and represents the third largest single-consumer item in landfills. If that sounds imposing, consider that the disposable diapers used by one baby in a family creates about fifty percent of the trash for the entire household! We also learned that despite the water and energy used to wash cloth diapers, the manufacturing of disposable diapers requires far more resources than cloth diapers do, including three and a half times more energy, about eight times the non-renewable resources, and 90 times the renewable resources.

Although we knew that cloth diapers were the more environmentally responsible choice, we were like most average Americans questioning if we were committed enough to be inconvenienced. That might be difficult -- what if it significantly changed our lifestyle?

We were exceedingly surprised and pleased to learn that cloth diapers have come a very long way since the days of giant white diapers, crackly vinyl pants, and razor-sharp diaper pins. Our first cloth diapers were none of the above - just soft fabric with a breathable, waterproof layer that we put on our baby all in one piece and fastened with Velcro. They are actually easier to use than a paper diaper - they never ripped, had an odd fit, or leaked. Because of the elastic across the back and around the thighs, we didn't have those poopy newborn blowouts that are so common with disposable diapers during those first few months.

The best thing was the ease of simply throwing the dirty diapers into the wash and quickly having fresh clean diapers to put on our baby. We saved thousands of dollars and felt good that we weren't throwing away hundreds of disposable diapers every month. Our fears about the inconvenience were completely unfounded - using cloth diapers was really easy!

I truly believe that most people want to make choices that are gentler on the earth - but will stop short if those choices significantly change their lifestyles or remove a must-have convenience item. The term "cloth diapers" invokes the image of messy, leaky, inconvenient diapering that most people run far away from -- we nearly did! But just like everything else, technology and the ingenuity of parents all over the world have made such wonderful improvements to cloth diapers that it truly is no more work, and no less convenient, than throw-away diapers.