Going Green with Baby: Cloth Diapers
When you have a baby your carbon footprint skyrockets. There is really no way around it but with a few simple steps, you can reduce your impact. One of the biggest things you can do to go green with your baby is to cloth diaper.
![Go green with your baby. Try cloth diapers](https://i0.wp.com/simpleathome.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/go-green-with-cloth-diapers.jpg?resize=700%2C467)
The biggest waste with babies and young children around the world is disposable diapers. They will not break down within your child’s lifetime… In fact, a diaper takes 500 years to break down in a landfill. I feel so guilty about the number of diapers we tossed out with our first baby. She was 4 before she was fully potty trained day and night.
With our 2nd baby, we decided to go with cloth diapers. Though I will admit it had nothing to do with our environmental impact. Our favorite brand of diaper was leading to babies hospitalized for chemical burns and my favorite off-brand was not available in Kansas.
We learned that cloth diapering was way easier than it used to be and they are a great way to save money when you have a baby. After a while, in my favorite diaper group, I learned about how much disposable diapers really affect the environment. I was proud of our choice to cloth diaper.
We are on baby number 5 and some of the covered we bought when we first started are still going strong. The sheer number of diapers those simple PUL covers have kept out of a landfill amazes me. Thousands of diapers when you count it out for not one or two children but 4 that number becomes astronomical.
Yes, I will admit it has not always been easy. I have had multiple spurts of handwashing those diapers. I have had times I wanted to just toss them out and move on to something that takes less work. When the basement flooded I admit I did grab a couple of packs of Huggies while I put my time back into balancing our lives and cleaning up the disaster that our basement became.
If you are looking to go green for your family with a baby cloth diapers are a great option and with the modern-day versions available the hardest part is an extra load of laundry every other day or so.