Letters to the Editor
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This article is sadly lightweight
I'm a big fan of Salon & Ask Pablo, but this article left me high and dry. As a new mom of a 10mos old, and a hefty researcher into the cloth versus disposable debate, this article concluded the same that I did - that diaper services are more eco, the rest is propoganda - but did nothing whatsoever to prove that point.
Nor did the author examine one of the largest diaper movements afoot - the new generation of super-sleek, attractive, easy to use cloth diapers that are meant to be washed in your home washing machine (see FuzzyBunz - http://www.fuzzibunz.com/).
We used these half and half with disposable diapers - very easy in the early months (before baby is eating solid foods and so before the poop gets more, uh, human-like). It was a no-effort solution, saved money and a bit of the environment we believe. I'd highly recommend it.
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Diaper service available where?
The NADS site only lists services in about 30 states, and most of those only offer service in a couple of cities. There isn't even a diaper service in Atlanta, a city of over 5 million people. Those services may be well and good, but they are far from widely available. West-cost-centric Salon writers like Pablo need to remember that MOST of us don't live in California.
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there must be a better way...
I'm not a parent but come from a big family and am quite familiar with the old cloth diaper system and have changed many a baby with modern disposables. I'm a little apprehensive about all disposables because I do wish to be ecologically responsible...and one issue not really touched-on here is the introduction of human feces in the household waste stream, how it effects landfills and a wealth of other recyling and environmental health issues.
So I guess flushing in some ways makes more sense than tossin' 'em into the trash with our other stuff.
What I would love to see is a diaper that is designed to accept the waste and recycle it, neutralizing the negatives and result in a positive via composting and some sort of boosted or accelerated composting technology. I imagine a home composting system which could do that specifically for babies diapers and more and more for adult disposables too. I'm now a caregiver for a parent and I am fully aware of what the inevitable is. I wish for it to be dignified and also easy and ecologically responsible...hangups about poop be damned.
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$ Disconnect
Cloth diaper use assumes either proximity to a diaper service OR a well-functioning washer/dryer on hand. My husband and I wen through a lot of hand wringing when we realized that we were out of diaper service range ad we couldn't afford the dryer (or upgraded washer) the task would require. Add in the ridiculous expense of most environment-friendly disposables, and we were stuck. We've tried to potty train early and switched to cloth training pants, but we've ended up using a lot of disposables over the years.
Somebody needs to come up with a cheap version for the many of us who need it!
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Cloth diapers are a breeze
Forget the diaper service. Cloth diapers are easy to wash at home and almost nobody uses pins anymore. I had a little handheld shower sprayer to rinse poop straight into the toilet--no dunking. Check out www.diaperpin.com for lots of diaper reviews and a helpful message board. I'm a pretty lazy person and using cloth was a breeze for me.
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"Saturday Night Live" approached this issue YEARS ago!!!
Am I the only one who remembers the skit about eco-friendly disposable diapers...sorry, can't remember who the performers were...some time in the 1990s...
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Washing at Home
The author should have probably gone into it, but almost all the studies show that washing cloth diapers at home use roughly the same amount of water and energy as creating the same number of disposable diapers. I.e. it's not all that effecient. Most of them leave out the fact that landfill space is not a particularly renewable resource, but that's cloth vs. disposables, not at home vs. diaper service.
Diaper services generally use the commercial washing services that hospitals use. They're very sanitary and they are very effecient. They are able to keep the water hot far more effeciently than you can do at home (and the diapers come out more sterile to boot).
In our market where energy is expensive, even the cost was cheaper to have a diaper service vs. washing ourselves. Just the cost of water and electricity was more.
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Cloth, g, or disposable? There is a fourth option - COMPOSTING
Ah, the joy I felt when I found that www.diapers.com now offers diapers by Nature Babycare. These diapers are fully compostable and even the packaging is compostable! We've been using them on our 22 month old twins for the past few months, especially at night, with gdiapers during the day.
My only misgiving is that they are imported from Sweden; but maybe if enough of us buy them, the maker can open a plant here in the U.S. (The alternative of all of us in the U.S. moving to Sweden would probably not be welcomed.)
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Basically you have two choices
You can live like it's 1850 or you can get used to the fact that it's not.
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Breaks my heart to say it, but beware g-diapers.
I used g-diapers and loved them. Until.
Until the drain pipe cover in the basement of my Brooklyn brownstone was forced off by an angry poop geyser and a 20 foot puddle of sewage spread across the floor.
And by sewage I mean human waste. The baby's, mine, the downstairs neighbors', everyone's. Human waste and g-diapers all over the basement.
I'm sure proponents will say "you didn't do it right" or somesuch, but sorry, it's true. If you live in a new house, I wouldn't see a problem, but if you live in an older building, think really carefully about using them.
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What about crate training them?
Just leave your baby in his or her kennel when you can't watch him or her.
Problem solved.
Seriously, though, although there isn't necessarily the paper material, wouldn't one have the same issue with carting biosolids to the landfill with any washed diaper too?
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Take another run at this issue, please, Pablo
I can't help but believe Pablo has sort of phoned this one in, having ignored the fastest growing diaper option -- cloth diapers for home washing.
I don't care what any Pampers-sponsored study says, you cannot convince me that washing a single diaper takes more energy or pollutes the environment more than: growing the cotton or paper for a disposable diaper, bleaching and treating it, extracting and refining the diaper's other components (plastic, absorbent crystals, etc.,)transporting all of those components to the factory, manufacturing them into a disposable diaper, wrapping it with 24 others in plastic, wrapping the package in a giant cardboard box (also manufactured), transporting that to a distributor, then on to a store, then to someone's home (usually by car and usually in a plastic bag, for heaven's sake,) using it once, wrapping it in another layer of plastic (also manufactured and transported for the purpose,) transporting that to a landfill in some unfortunate quarter as far from human habitat as possible, then going about our business while it releases methane, grows nasty bacteria, and fails to decompose for thousands of years.
Compared to all that, surely washing a diaper, even a cotton one, even in hot water, even with bleach and strong detergents and even drying it in a tumble dryer, has a pretty negligible environmental impact. Furthermore, you can buy lovely diapers made from organic bamboo (very kind to the environment), flush the yucky part down the toilet using thin paper liners, wash them in warm water without bleach and line-dry them (which if you really are that green you'll be doing as much as possible with your laundry anyway.)
I used disposables with my first baby and switched to washables with the other two and the sum total of added work they created for me was two extra loads of laundry per week. Pretty minimal when you make a mental picture of the mountain of diapers I didn't put in a landfill.
I have no idea what the relative impact of a diaper service versus washing them yourself is, but as the diaper service is not available everywhere it seems to me that you would have done better to compare disposables to the option which is available to all, and which is gaining in popularity at an amazing rate. (Try googling cloth diapers and see how many brands there are and how many websites are selling them.)
gDiapers are an interesting hybrid, but very few people compost at all, or want to spend the time to dissent and flush each one so they aren't really a good solution for everyone.
Given how much of our landfill is composed of diapers, I do wish you would try again with this question and give one of your trademark thorough and objective viewpoints.