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.
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.
Do you feel it’s worth going green with a baby?
