Saturday, July 24, 2010

Why I cloth diaper

Ok so many of my friends wonder why I cloth diaper. Well the very first reason why I cloth is because of the price. Cloth for the most basic "package or system" $200 can last from birth to potty training. Disposables for 3 years of diapering can cost $2,000. You can do the math.  Unfortunately I have to part time cloth since day cares here in Utah if they are State funded or whatever program I'm in, are not allowed to use cloth. So I'm still spending a fair amount of money on both. But not as much as I would if I was full time disposables.Oh and for a speech I had to do for a class I wrote on facts about CDing and I found in two years of washing 2-3 loads of diapers it will only cost $14 extra in your water bill. AND you can reuse the diapers for multiple babies as long as you treat them nice.
 Ok so here is the tricky thing to talk about. The environment. Some people claim that the water to wash the diapers is worse then the diapers going to the landfill. Which if you do the math, on average a baby will go through 5,000 diapers. And that's if you are able to train at 3 years. And according to some studies it can take up to 500 years for one diaper to biodegrade. Now that is just a study, so it's not accurate, but even if it takes 100 years.. . that's a lot of years.Here are the stats on landfill and tree usage. 24.7 billion disposables are used a year. 92% of those diapers end up in landfills. 300lbs of wood, 50lbs of petroleum feedstock, 20lbs of bleach, 2.3 times more water used in producing disposables than cloth PER BABY!
Now for chemicals in diapers. This i'm not so happy with. All of the materials in the disposables are bleached, a bi product of bleaching are dioxins.EPA linked liver cancer, immune suppression, and lab rat genetic mutations to dioxins. Sodium Polyacrylate is the absorbant chemical that can absorb 200-300 times its weight in liquid. If ingested can cause breathing problems including asthma, Cause severe rashes, bleeding from perineum and scrotum tissue, fever, vomiting, and staph infection. In 1985 was banned from tampons because it was linked to Toxic Shock Syndrome. If as little as 5 grams is swallowed, it can kill a child.

Brooke, this next part is for you. Poop. It's inevitable. You can't escape it. When I was using disposables every time Oliver relived himself, there was a blowout. Normally there was hardly any in the diaper and everything everywhere. I can't tell you how many loads of laundry I did just from blowouts alone. Now that I have started cloth, I've only had one blow out and that's because Oliver had a stomach bug and it was pure liquid (TMI, I know. But you will get used to it). BUT with cloth you do have to wash it. Even wipe if off in the toilet since you don't want all the poop in you washer. But there are products that can help. My favorite (even though I haven't tried them yet, I will soon. Just lack of money) are flushable liners. They usually come in a pack of 100 for $7-$9  They go on top of the cloth so that when he/she poops you can just flush it down the toilet and dissolves in 20-30 days. Less mess for you to deal with. Also there are sprayers that you can attach to your toilet so that you don't have to do so much work to get the matter off. So you still have to clean, just not as bad. And honestly washing them isn't bad at all. But that's another post some other time.
So here is the latest cuteness! He loves Kix cereal and has found a new place to store it other than his cheeks.

12 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting that! :) Very useful info. Since my husband will be the one staying home and not me, I may have to convince him as well. But the disposable liners don't sound so bad....

    <3 Brooke

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  2. he is adorable, and this post was very informative.I've heard many of these things before from my sister, but it's nice to learn more. When Michael and I do start having kids, we'll almost definitely use cloth :-)

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  3. I'm loving cloth diapering. I love not feeling guilty about wasted diapers, and I love finding cute patterns and colors. I'm glad we switched over. They work so well. We have had hardly any leaks since we started. I have to say they really aren't that much more work then normal diapers. Washing out the poop seems about as hard as having to take the disposable out to the dumpster. My husband is going to try and hook up a sink sprayer to our toilet for washing off the poop. It's about half the price. I'll let you know if we have success.

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  4. Oo!! Do. I hear you need to make sure that the connector parts are metal and not plastic. So that is something to look into.

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  5. Well I think that it's just as hard to wash out the cloth diapers as it is to wash out blow outs on clothes and sheets. I hate stains to the second he is done pooping, I take his outfit off and rinse it, so there really was no big addition to my routine.

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  6. I'll have him make a video about what he did to make the sprayer work and put it on my blog.

    I hear yeah on the stains. I'm always rinsing out clothes here too. We don't have a lot of blow outs just messes from eating and playing outside. You can usually find my sink full of soaking clothes and bibs. Maybe that's why rinsing diapers didn't seem so bad.

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  7. lol I wish I could really convey that it's not bad at all.

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  8. He is a real cutie!

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  9. I'm using sposies due to a yeast rash right now and we have 2-3 blowouts EVERY day- ugh! I barely ever have blowouts with my cloth (we do still sometimes, but very rarely and its because we still have EBF poo!)

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  10. Ugh, I know how you feel! Olive has had two yeast infections and it is not fun!
    California Baby diaper cream has tea tree oil in it, so it's naturally an antifungal! And it's cloth diaper safe. I use it all the time on Olivers bum and without a liner. Haven't had an issue in two months!

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