Cloth Diapers ( Part One )

 I've been asked to do a post about cloth diapers. Some people wanna know about different kinds, some wanna know all about cleaning and accessories, What kinds fit best with what ages, and some just wanna know about the day-to-day stuff. There is just SO much to talk about with cloth diapers that I have been avoiding the subject, even though its something so near and dear to me. I've decided that it is going to be best to do this in parts. So, here it goes!!

The first thing I am going to tackle is WHY. Why choose cloth diapers? Why would you choose to re-use something that your baby POOPS in? Well for a lot of reasons....

1) It saves TONS of money!
2) It is better for the environment
3) Harmful chemicals in disposables
4) They're cute, easy, and prevent diaper rash

Money
Disposables are really expensive. The average on costs $0.23 cents. Children, on average, go through 12 diapers a day for the first 8 months and then 8 diapers a day from 8 to 24 months. That's 9,600 diapers! The means you will spend $2,208 in diapers! That's a lot of money. But, we're not done. Forget about wipes? On average they cost $ 0.042 cents per wipe. You use about two of them per diaper change which means you go through 19,200 of them. Which is $806.40. For something that wipes your kids butt.... sounds a tad bit ridiculous. That brings your grand total to a whopping $3,014 if you diaper for two years. A lot of kids go longer, and if you're like me you go through a lot more than 2 wipes per change.

So now you're probably wondering how much cloth diapers ON AVERAGE cost. Lets say you buy 36 cloth diapers at $9 each (some are cheaper some are more expensive) that's gonna cost you $324. You're gonna use them 9600+ times which brings the average cost total for each change to $0.03 Add $0.04 cents to each change for the cost of detergent and water to clean them. Now if you buy 40 cloth wipes add $35.00 (you can very easily make your own cloth wipes, I'll do a tutorial soon) Your diapering total comes out to $743.00 .

That means that you save $2,271.40 cloth diapering!! Now just imagine if you use the same diapers for your future children! The saving goes up and up!
(Thanks Bottoms up Diaper Shop for providing these stats)


Environment
Did you know that a diaper put in the landfill today will probably still be there 550 years from now?! All 9,600 of them we were talking about!! That is a lot of diapers sitting in landfills. If that wasn't enough Massive amounts of wood pulp are used each year in the process of making of disposable diaper (outer and inner paper layers). 25,000 trees are used each year, in addition to 3.4 billion gallons of oil used to make the plastic liners in the diapers. Gross.

Chemicals
Did I get you interested about what else is in disposables? This part is by far the worst.

Sodium Polycarlate- This is used as a powder to form the inner pad of the diaper. its what makes it absorbent. Its the jelly stuff that sometimes comes out. It can hold 100x its weight in water, can stick to baby and cause reactions, studies have shown that when rats ingest the chemical it can cause death, band from tampons in 1985 because of TSS, children have died from ingesting just 5 grams of it, and it can cause female organ problems

Dioxin- This is a by-product of when the bleach the diapers to get the nice clean 'white' look. Its a huge CANCER CAUSING chemical. The EPA lists it as the MOST TOXIC of all cancer linked chemicals. It can cause birth defects, skin and liver disease, and many other things. Its banned in most countries...but not the US. How sick is that?

Tributly TIN (TBT)- A highly toxic pollutant that spreads through the skin. It harms the immune system and and hormonal system. And some people believe that it can cause sterility in boys.

Do you still wanna put sposies on your baby??

Cute, Easy, and Prevent Diaper Rash

Cloth diapers come in huge variety of different colors, prints, and fun accessories to go along with them. One of my diapers has space ships and robots on the them!! They are super easy to take care of too. I do an extra load of laundry every two-three days with a cloth diaper safe detergent. Many moms have also noticed that cloth diaper give their child fewer diaper rashes, probably due to the fact that they don't have harmful chemicals in them that irritate baby's skin.

I hope that this post has been helpful in the ''why'' of cloth diapers!! Be ready for the next post of ''types''