There’s no doubt about it: What goes into your baby must come out of your baby. The doubt begins when you try to determine the best way to dress your baby’s bottom. If you are like most parents, you want the ease of disposables and the low cost of cloth all rolled into one. You want to rest easy, knowing you are helping rather than hindering the environment. Simply put, you want to make the right decision.
Shelley Haggert of Windsor, Ont. wrapped three children in cloth diapers before she realized disposables suited her lifestyle much better. “When my third [child] was about 3 months old, I quit the cloth habit forever and started clipping coupons again.” What took Haggert so long? Why guilt, of course. “Earth Day came back into vogue while [my] first was still in diapers, and all of a sudden it was a sin to use disposable diapers,” she says. “[I thought,] ‘What kind of earth was I going to leave my children?’ I had to do my part to save the planet.”
Landfill space is a hot commodity, and disposable diapers are among the top five items found strewn within the mess. Worse yet, it can take up to 500 years for a disposable diaper to break down. It seems reasonable for environmentalists to be concerned. But there are two sides to every story. And the truth is, cloth diapers require resource draining activities as well. Some studies show that cloth diapering has four times the burden on water supplies than disposables. Not to mention the energy consumed when diapers are washed and dried in electric or gas powered appliances.