| Why would anyone forgo the convenience of disposables for old-fashioned cloth?
Health Reasons
Disposable diapers contain chemicals that are known to cause skin irritations, bleeding, fever, infection, cancer, sterility, and even death if ingested. Read more about Health Risks with Disposables.
Environmental Problems
Cloth diapering is simply the most important eco-friendly choice you can make as a new parent. Common sense tells us that using a reusable product is more environmentally responsible than using a disposable product. There are three main environmental problems with using disposable diapers:
Wastefulness: There is no contest between cloth and disposable diapers when it comes to responsible management of our resources. Study after study has shown that disposable diapers use twenty times more raw materials, like crude oil and wood pulp. Plus, the manufacture and use of disposable diapers amounts to 2.3 times more water wasted than cloth. Overburdened Landfills: Think about this: each child will generate about 2 tons worth of disposable diaper solid waste and each diaper takes somewhere between 250 – 500 years to decompose (if it ever does). Does this sound like a sustainable practice? The only other items that outnumber the amount of disposables in landfills are newspapers and beverage and food containers. Human Waste in the Wrong Place: It is irresponsible and illegal to discard of human waste in the garbage, according to the World Health Organization, American Academy of Pediatrics, and The American Public Health Association. This is because raw, untreated human waste, just burried in a landfill, is a health hazard on a grand scale. Get more details on each of these environmental issues at Environmental Problems with Disposables
High Cost
Disposables aren't cheap! If you use about 6000 diapers per child from birth to potty training, and you calculate the cost as if they were all size 3 (the size they stay in the longest) by Pampers, you'd spend $2229 - and that's if you only buy the Super Mega 70-diaper packs! Everyone's diapering costs will differ, based on a myriad of factors. You may spend a lot more if you tend to buy in small packages or a little less if you buy off-brands. In contrast to $2229 per child, high-quality, modern cloth diapers will cost you about $300-500, but they will diaper more than one child through potty-training and they have a resale value of about 50%! For more details on the cost of disposable diapering, see The Diaper Drama on DiaperPin.com.
You say, "Ok, ok, I get it - cloth diapering is good. But is it practical?" What if I showed you that
Cloth Diapering Really is Easy?
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