Disposable diapers take between 100 and 150 years to degrade in a landfill. Given that disposable diapers were only invented in the ‘40s, that means every single disposable diaper ever used is still in a landfill somewhere (provided it made it there in the first place). Current estimates are that in the United States alone 21 billion disposable diapers per year are sent to landfills. There’s a counter argument out there that cloth diapers use a lot of water and energy resources so they aren’t any better for the environment. That has, I think, largely been debunked (on the basis of the amount of water needed to produce disposable diapers), but I will say that we usually hang diapers to dry outside so we don’t use energy to run the drier. In terms of water use, I don’t think an extra load of laundry every 2 to 3 days uses any more water than an extra person flushing the toilet 8 times a day (as we would do if she used the toilet the equivalent number of times as she uses a diaper). As for detergents, we don’t use them on P’s diapers. We use laundry soap. Detergents ruin cloth diapers anyway. We use Charlie’s Soap, but there are other brands out there. They are the same thing as the soaps a lot of hunters use on their hunting clothes so there is no smell.
The Costs
The cost consideration was not one of my top motivating factors. I would have done it even if it cost more than disposables because the environmental impacts were such a concern for me. Besides, I couldn’t really be sure what they would cost by comparison until after I had been using them awhile. I was aware that lots of people claimed cloth diapering was much cheaper, but I took that with a grain of salt. People will often manipulate numbers to justify their activities (see Mark Twain re: statistics), and I just wasn’t sure if their calculations were truly accurate. I saw lots of numbers quoted about the “average” cost of disposable diapers in a year, but I couldn’t be sure how much disposables would cost . After I had been using cloth diapers for awhile I did my own cost comparisons because I was genuinely curious to know if it was a good deal or not.
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