Letters to the Editor
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You left out an option
I'm not sure why your only mention of cloth diapers was in conjunction with a diaper service. A service may be a nice luxury, but hardly necessary, and not even the most eco-frienly choice. I've diapered two kids in unbleached cotton prefolds and hemp/cotton wipes that I bought on ebay for about $75 total, including covers. I washed them every 2-3 days in a low water washing machine, never used chlorine bleach (unlike every diaper service I've ever read about) and line dried them when the weather was good (the sun is miraculous for removing stubborn poopy stains.) Now that my kids are potty trained, I have a batch of fantastically absorbent rags. It's rare for parenting magazines to even mention cloth diapering as an option, so many folks have no idea that it's an extraordinarily easy and budget friendly, not to mention green, option.
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"Yes, but" to cloth
Both of my kids, born in the early 80's, wore cloth diapers at home. It is a great solution, either with a service or on your own: almost no diaper rash, and much, much cheaper. Also, when there are bad messes to be dealt with, it IS nice to have a big stack of absorbent cloth for which stains are not an issue.
The problem is that when you take the baby anywhere with child care, be it a daycare environnment, a church nursery, or anywhere else someone else may diaper that baby, they often require that you bring and use disposables. I could understand it (the reasons I was give ranged from "What do we do with a dirty one?" to "I'm scared of the pins.")
It wasn't possible to completely avoid the disposables, but I still recommend them highly. I think they are better for the kid, as well as for the environment.
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Phooey, pooey
Anyone who says flushing anything besides human digestive waste down the toilet is the best way to get rid of it is selling horsefeathers.
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cloth diapers need a service?
What about people like my wife and I who use cloth diapers and wash them at home? It strikes me as ever-so-slightly out of touch with reality to make the comparison be between disposable diapers and a diapers service. Look around. There's a lot of sites that sell cloth diapers, patterns for sewing them, knitting patterns for wrappers, and so on. I'm curious as to the relative proportions of people who pay for a diaper service and people who wash their own diapers. From what I've seen, it looks like a significant number of cloth diaper users don't rely on a service.
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Elimination communication still involves diapers...
...it just involves using them for less time overall.
The idea of a "diaper-free baby" is sort of a misnomer, despite the name of groups like Diaper Free Baby (http://www.diaperfreebaby.org).
I am a mentor for the local DFB group in the Bay Area, and most everyone in our group has their baby in diapers or training pants. The key idea is to offer your baby a chance to use a potty or toilet from a very young age, instead of ONLY using diapers.
Most babies absolutely love this concept, and catch on quite fast, but it's certainly not 100%, which is why we use diapers as backup. Still, you can save a lot of diapers by using elimination communication techniques, and it makes cloth diapering much more practical, since with EC it's fairly easy for even small babies to do all their pooping in the toilet. If you rarely have poopy diapers, then cloth all of a sudden becomes more attractive and feasible, because you're mostly just dealing with pee.
My own two kids rarely had a poopy diaper from the age of 2-3 months on. They just plain prefer to use the toilet, with my help of course. Very common...but in our culture very few people ever think to offer. It's assumed that babies have no control over their bodily functions until much later. Complete balderdash.
At home I use bamboo training pants from Simple Simon Baby on my 14 month old. He wears gDiapers (which I love) when out and about, or when he's with his babysitter. At night he wears a disposable.
I did EC with my older son too (now 4yo) and he was out of diapers in the daytime by 15 months. I estimated that we saved THOUSANDS of diapers by doing EC with him. We still used a lot of diapers, but not nearly as many as we would have by conventionally potty-training at 3, which seems to the the most common age to *start* potty-training these days.
Sadly, by that point most kids are totally diaper-trained, and it takes quite an effort to undo all that. You get a lot of kids asking for a diaper to poop in, etc. Yuck.
EC is certainly worth a try. Anyone can do it part-time. Even if you just save one diaper a day, it's still something. I have a primer on part-time EC use up on my blog at http://www.viviente.com/2005/10/how_to_do_parttime_pottytraini_1.html
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EC supposes regularity
Everything I read about getting a very young kid to poop in a toilet or potty started off saying most kids are regular. Stick 'em on the potty on his schedule.
No advice was ever given for non-regular kids. Toilet training is part instinct (learning where to go) and part conscious (on the part of the kid). The first step is for the kid to recognize what's happening.
Until the kid is aware of what's happening in his own body, (which might be 1-1.5) you're training the parent, not the child. This might be fine, and still reduces diaper use, but please, don't suggest that a baby under one is attaining any potty/toilet using expertise.
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Goodness
"elimination communication" is ridiculous when both parents work or you have furniture and rugs and floors that can be damaged by pee and poop.
Unless you spend all day staring at the kid, they're gonna go when you are not paying attention and they are going to go in the worst possible place at the worst possible time to inflict the worst possible damage.