Go Green

Diapering your baby might seem like a pretty straightforward process. And you may never have considered that there would be any environmental repercussions to doing it. After all, every baby needs diapers. You slap ‘em on, let baby do his or her business and then toss ‘em in the trash. But that’s not the end of the story.

According to research done by a group called the Real Diaper Association, disposable diapers can take anywhere from 250 to 500 years to completely decompose.

Think about those figures for a minute: That would mean that every single disposable diaper ever manufactured and used still exists today. They’re sitting in landfills — more than 27 billion disposable diapers added to the pile each year, according to RDA estimates.

The environmental footprint of disposable diapers spreads further than that, too. It takes more than 300 pounds of wood, 50 pounds of petroleum feedstocks and 20 pounds of chlorine to produce disposable diapers for one baby each year. And what’s worse, several studies have shown there may be health implications involved for those wearing the diapers. According to the RDA, disposable diapers contain the following:

- Dioxin, an extremely toxic by-product of the paper-bleaching process. It is a carcinogenic chemical, listed by the EPA as the most toxic of all cancer-linked chemicals. It is banned in most countries, but not the U.S.

- Tributyltin (TBT), a toxic pollutant known to cause hormonal problems in humans and animals.

- Sodium polyacrylate, a type of super-absorbent polymer which becomes a gel-like substance when wet. A similar substance had been used in super-absorbency tampons until the early 1980s, when it was revealed that the material increased the risk of toxic shock syndrome.

Pretty scary stuff, and that’s on top of the thought of massive piles of human waste towering in our landfills. So what to do? The thing that anyone can do is start off with, or switch to, cloth diapers. But why cloth diapers, some might ask. After all, aren’t they flimsy, leaky and inconvenient and not really that good at keeping all that mess in? Isn’t that why everyone embraced disposable diapers when they were introduced? Perhaps the answer was yes at one time, but the cloth diapers of today are not like your mother or grandmother’s cloth diapers.

My wife and I use cloth diapers on our 2 1/2-year-old son. We switched over when he was about 9 months old, and although I was hesitant at first — for all the usual reasons — I haven’t regretted the change. Just thinking about the thousands of diapers my family has kept out of landfills is enough for me. Cloth diapers are a lot more convenient these days. They can come with snaps or Velcro tabs – no more safety pin sticks — that hold them snugly in place. They have elastic built in to hold in leaks. Plus, they’re a lot more stylish now than the plain whites you might think of. And in the long run, they can be a lot cheaper than disposable diapers. Surprisingly enough, there’s a re-sale market for cloth diapers, too, so you can make back a large percentage of what you paid for the diapers in the first place (roughly $15 to $20 per diaper).

There are plenty of varieties of cloth diapers to choose from, and plenty of resources available online; just do a Web search for “cloth diapers.”

- Nick