Dear Jessica,
Before reaching that stage every new parent longs for—the era of underwear—each bundle of joy will be rebundled in diapers 6,000 to 10,000 times; that’s a lot of poopy pants, droopy drawers and stinky icks. (It’s hard to tell which gets more tiresome, changing dirty diapers or calling them stupid names.) How best to bundle baby’s bum those thousands of times is always hotly debated between those arguing for reuse and those who figure disposables are better because we have scarce water for cleaning, but lots of landfill space for disposing. But the picture is bigger than that. To determine the better choice for any product, you need to take into account its full life cycle—not just the way it will be disposed, but also how it was manufactured.
According to industry data from Franklin Associates and the American Petroleum Institute, 3.5 billion gallons of oil as well as 250,000 trees are used to produce the 18 billion throwaway diapers used in the US each year. Wood is pulped (using an enormous amount of water) and then commonly bleached white with chlorine, a process that produces dioxin, one of the most toxic substances ever made by humans. Once in the landfill, diaper waste has the potential to pollute local groundwater and the diaper itself has little chance of ever decomposing. When your baby’s great, great, great, great (etc.) grandchildren come into the world, those diapers will still be lying in the landfill.
The production of cotton cloth diapers can involve pesticides and chemicals to grow the cotton, chlorine is typically used to bleach the fibers, and certainly the process involves water as well. The difference is that if you use reusable diapers, you’ll only need 3-6 dozen of them over the course of a 2 1/2 year diapering period, not 6,000-10,000, so you’ve saved resources by simply using dramatically fewer. Plus, those diapers can double as burping rags, be reused by another child, reused again as cleaning rags, and eventually composted instead of landfilled once they’re in shreds.
Now to the argument that the scales get tipped in favor of disposables because you have to wash cloth diapers. That could be true if the diapers are being washed by a service. You’d have to figure in the impacts of transportation, the bleaches and rinse cycles used to sanitize them, etc. Washing diapers at home, however, allows you to go bleach free and requires far less water, typically 50-70 gallons of water every three days, which is about the same as flushing a toilet five times a day. So Eco-Cycle’s recommendation (a recommendation shared by many other Colorado environmental groups) is that the best choice is to use cloth diapers and wash them at home, using these green and convenient practices:
- Choose organic, unbleached cotton diapers (visit www.gaiam.com to purchase).
- Use a wrap with cloth diapers—you don’t have to deal with pins.
- When washing, simply shake loose feces into toilet, or swish in toilet bowl to remove most of it (something you should ALWAYS do, whether you’re using reusables or disposables. Fecal matter should never go in the trash). Place wet diapers in a lidded diaper pail lined with a garbage bag. At the end of the day, if there aren’t enough diapers to run a load of laundry, place the diaper pail contents in the washing machine and fill it with water and detergent, but don’t complete the cycle until you have enough for a full load.
- Use a phosphate-free laundry soap without fragrances. Don’t use bleach, but use Borax from time to time to whiten.
- Rinse with a cup of distilled vinegar to remove all traces of laundry soap and urine (good for baby’s bottom), and to soften the fabric (don’t use fabric softener, it makes diapers less absorbent).
- Cut down on energy use and get diapers sterilized and whiter by drying them on a clothesline or in a sunny window.
- Use cloth wipes instead of disposables and throw them in with your diapers.
And just in case you’re wondering about cloth diapers from a health perspective, consider that the new Boulder Community Foothills Hospital puts all newborns in cloth during their stay at the facility.
For more information on cleaning cloth diapers, options for chlorine-free disposable diapers and eco-tips for babies, click here.
