I have friends who are really environmentally conscious people. They follow every available "green" trend out there to the best of their abilities in their efforts to reduce their environmental impact. I applaud their efforts. As part of their "greenitude" they choose to diaper their little ones with cloth. All of them are SAHMs (Stay-At-Home-Moms). Why does that matter? Read on.
I am an active duty Army mom. Once I return to work and return to business as usual, I will be away from my kids for a full 12 hours per day AT LEAST. I will pump so that I may continue to breastfeed, even though I'll have to do it in bathrooms and locker rooms because there is no "nursing mom" room in my office building and I don't have a private office. This is me, doing the best for my kids. The last thing I want to do is spend the precious little time each day I have with them washing dirty diapers.
Let's look at the options. Cloth diapers pose a big up-front cost in about $15-$18 per diaper. Most starter packs of cloth diapers come in sets of one dozen. My son goes through about 10 diapers per day, maybe more or less but it's a good average. I'd need to start with two dozen just to ensure I'd have enough AND I'd be doing laundry daily just to ensure that he is able to have clean diapers while I'm washing the dirty ones. If I wait two days, I'm screwed because there won't be diapers for him while the others are being washed. Additionally, assuming I'd be using cotton, I'd be doing each load of diapers three times according to the recommended guidelines by the Real Diaper Industry Association. This is three loads of hot-water wash (probably not full loads because a dozen diapers roughly equates to as many pairs of socks in your wash), and three separate trips through the dryer. The "cha-ching" to both the water and electric companies makes me nauseated. We use cold water to wash everything but whites once per WEEK right now. Three hot-water loads per day??? Even if I were a lazier type of parent (and who isn't?) and chose only to hot-water wash them once, it's still 6 more hot water loads than we normally do.
I am too lazy to figure out how many gallons of water are used in each wash cycle or how many kilowatt hours in each wash-and-dry cycle, but we'd effectively be doubling our consumption of washing and drying each week if I went the one-wash-only route (it would quadruple our consumption if I did the three-wash-sanitizing route). Our consumption of fuel oil (which heats our home and our water heater) is currently only about 4 gallons per day, but I estimate that would probably double with all the extra use of hot water. Fuel oil costs about $4.00 per gallon where I live. I also estimate an extra $20-30 per month on our electricity bill for the energy use. Of course, we'd be doubling (or quadrupling) our detergent use as well. Then there is wear-and-tear on the washer and dryer to consider. Using it that much more frequently means I'd need to start saving up for the replacements and/or repairs. The hidden costs of cloth diapering are astounding.
So perhaps a diaper service would work to our advantage and save us those pennies for energy costs, the wear-and-tear on the washer and dryer, and all that (hot) water! They can ensure sterilization and deliver the diapers to my door. But... the AVERAGE price is $20 per week. I pay $40 a MONTH for my disposables! How is cloth diapering supposed to save me time or money?
To be fair about the inconvenience, cloth diapers have come a long way since my own infancy. Many companies offer pre-folded diapers with waterproof covers that secure with hook-and-loop or snap closures. No more folding it all up yourself or having to use a scary pin on a squirming infant. It now takes about as much time to diaper a baby in cloth as it does in disposable. Of course, if your kid is like mine, be prepared to "waste" a diaper here and there because he wasn't done with his "business" before you started the changing process.
As for the environmental impact, I read an article stating disposable diapers account for 2% of waste in the U.S. This means 98% is "something else." Additionally, disposable diaper companies (the largest being Proctor and Gamble) have come under political pressure by environmental groups and financial pressure considering the fact that the "inconvenience" has pretty much been taken out of using cloth. Now, even disposable diapers can be recycled. In uber-green states like Washington, some diaper services are now picking up used disposables and running them through the same processes they use to sanitize their cloth diapers, breaking apart disposables into recyclable components, and reducing landfill input.
The bottom line here is that MY bottom line stays in the black when I use disposables. It works for my family. When I'm away from my kids so frequently, I want as much time with them as possible. Additionally, my daycare center (which is flexible on many things) still requires the use of disposables in their centers. Since many families use cloth during the day and disposables at night or on trips (for better leak protection and to avoid having to cart around dirties), it hardly seems worth it to me to bother with cloth. The one MAJOR benefit I see to using cloth over disposables is that potty training happens faster with kids in cloth because they feel the wetness/dirtiness faster than a disposable-diaper-wearing kid would.
Ultimately, each family must come to a decision about what is important to them. SAHMs get to spend all their time (if they want) with their little ones. So, what's a few loads of laundry in the mix? No big deal. Studies have also shown that in the longer term, cloth is cheaper than disposables (mostly because of that whole early-potty-training bit; kids in disposables potty train around age three and kids in cloth do it a year earlier on average). There is no judgment here against anyone deciding to use cloth over disposable diapers. If you can do it, I think that's great. It just doesn't work for us. And within this blog, I have detailed several reasons why it doesn't work for us.
Still, I find it amazing to see that people get up in arms over these decisions about whether to use cloth or disposable, to share a bed or not share a bed, to breastfeed or bottle-feed, to use organic or homemade baby foods or buy it from a jar, to stay at home or have a job, to home school or send them off to public or private school, etc. My litmus test is my own kids. Both seem very happy and healthy. My 3-year-old is well-adjusted, socialized, has an extensive vocabulary (that often surprises many people), and enjoys life. She IS life in a 35-pound bag of meat and bones. My nearly-6-week-old is smiling at me and cooing, gaining weight at an alarming rate for a breastfed baby, and growing like a weed.
The fact that we have options is great. We can tailor our child-rearing practices to meet the needs of our families and our world. Who doesn't love that?
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