Cloth diapering – A virtue, why? …. And how to do it?

I am at a stage in life where almost all my friends have very young children or will be having them in the near future. I am willing to bet a 100% that each of them have considered the question of whether to start a family at this time or not. The decision is mostly based on lifestyle and the impact that a newborn can have on their personal, professional and monetary circumstances. 

As a new parent I think that everybody should carefully consider this ‘impact’ because it is life changing to the extent that every action of ours will mold the future of those tiny amazing beings in ways that are not even fathomable until one embarks on that journey.

The single-most beautiful thing that I have witnessed among all the new parents in my circle is that they are going and willing to go many selfless miles to do what is best for their little one. Every sneeze, sniffle and yawn calls for a reaction that is pure emotion. They live in the moment and pray that time does not fly too soon and that they can enjoy their fresh, flawless creation for that much longer. But time flies soon. Soon enough that these children will recognize good from bad, happy from sad, love from hatred. They will also realize as young adults, that they will need to acclimate themselves with the lasting change that their parents brought about on their home – on Earth!

When I was pregnant, everything that I did made me think about consequences. I attribute it to the cautious state that pregnancy keeps us in. We need to eat healthy, stay away from common cold, anything that is going around in the form of germs, keep the toxins at bay and so on. It is instinct! When we are harboring new life, we do everything in our power to make it go well. We are so engaged in the now that it is hard to imagine that baby grows into an adult and faces challenges, that we can only imagine, in professions and life that will be far different from what we know.

However, if there is one thing we can do, considering all these bells and whistles we hear about the changes in our beautiful home Earth is that we can ensure that our little one is not a liability on the Earth as soon as she sets foot on this planet. If we can keep them that way as a collective force, they will be so grateful that we cared enough to right the wrongs that have already occurred.

I read a lot when I was pregnant. It included topics about the human body, the impact of everything around us on who we become. I realized that we live in a chemical lab. As a family, we began looking for green alternatives. We wanted to minimize the amount of chemicals I was taking in or rubbing onto myself.

Then, as my husband and I began to put together our baby registry, as a matter of habit, we looked at reviews and the ‘ingredient list’ on everything we were going to purchase for our lovely little baby. In talking with other new parents, in attending baby related talks/discussions and at social gatherings, there was never an occasion where the word diaper would not be uttered. It was made very clear to us that the next two to three years of our lives would revolve around nappy changes. Clearly this was a very important part of becoming parents - A rite of passage pretty much! So I started researching about all there is to diapers.

Very quickly, I learned about many horrific details about those nasty diapers.

Here are some noteworthy excerpts:

Volume and pricing

Babies do a lot of pooping. In fact, the average baby goes through 6-8 diapers a day. Your baby will use between 6,500–10,000 diapers before potty training around 30 months old. If you use disposables and disposable wipes, this costs about $75–$100 a month retail—at least $3,000 per child!

According to a 2010 study, one-third of U.S. mothers are cutting back on basic necessities (such as food, utilities, and childcare) to buy diapers for their children. But as much as disposable diapers cost individual families, they cost us even more as a nation and as a planet.

Multipliers

We, as a nation, pay through the nose for disposable diapers throughout their life-cycle.

Even factoring in the water and energy used to launder cloth diapers, in the full-cost accounting, from farm to factory to storefront, compared to cloth diapers, disposables:

·       create 2.3 times more water waste,

·       use 3.5 times more energy,

·       use 8.3 times more non-renewable raw materials (like oil and minerals),

·       use 90 times more renewable raw materials (like tree pulp and cotton),

·       and use 4 to 30 times as much land for growing or mining raw materials.

Oil usage (precious non-renewable resource that runs the world!)

A disposable diaper is practically dripping in oil. Oil is the raw material for the polyethylene plastic in disposables and it takes about 1 cup of crude oil just to make the plastic for 1 disposable diaper. Taking that a bit further, assuming you use at least 6,500 diapers, this means that it takes about 1,625 quarts of oil to diaper your baby for 30 months—not including the oil involved in the diapers’ manufacture and delivery.

For the nation, this means that over 250,000 trees are destroyed and over 3.4 billion gallons of oil are used every single year to manufacture disposable diapers in the United States. For that amount of oil, we could have powered over 5,222,000 cars in the same time period.

Read more in the fascinating article at http://www.smallfootprintfamily.com/dangers-of-disposable-diapers

It took me less than a second to Google and find these numbers and they are all over the Internet.

I have to admit that this kept me awake at nights. I could not get over the fact that my little girl was going to become such a waste-generating resource-sucking machine before she could even utter her first deliberate meaningful word.  And that she will continue to use these diapers for more than double the time after that first sweet word of love is expressed.

I am delighted to say that when I expressed this worry, my family was so supportive in helping me find an alternative (cloth) diapering system and today after 20 months of making this change, we are proud to say that we started our child on the right foot. We enabled her to keep her carbon footprint small. I bet that she will be proud of us in the future when she learns that her parents really care about the condition of the planet we leave behind for her and her future!! We genuinely want her to be healthy and happy and we are willing to do something about it rather than fret that the rest of society is trashing my planet.

With this personal story, I would like to introduce you to all the steps (including trial and error and options) that go into the fun activity of cloth diapering. There is ample opportunity to add creativity, art, personality and innovation to your diapering system. You will be so proud that you kept those soft cheeks out of harm’s way without succumbing to something that only seems convenient but really is not!! Don’t fall into the retail web of disposable diapers. The discount hunting, the grocery runs, the Amazon large boxes pile-up can all be avoided for something that is less than an hour of your time each week!

Let’s get started with basics in the following blog!! J

Please leave your thoughts and comments. It takes a village to raise a child and let’s do this together!