Babies do a lot of pooping. In fact, the average baby goes through an average of 6-8 diapers a day. Unless you practice elimination communication, your baby will use an average of 6,500 diapers before potty training at roughly 30 months old. If you use disposables, this costs about $100 a month, or $3,000 per child!
Consider these alarming facts about disposable diapers:
- Over 250,000 trees are destroyed and over 3.4 billion gallons of oil are used every year to manufacture disposable diapers in the United States. That equates to enough gasoline to power OVER 5,222,000 cars for an entire YEAR!
- 11 billion pounds of untreated body excrement, which may carry over 100 intestinal viruses, are brought to landfills via disposable diapers each year.
- Oil is the raw material for the polyethylene in disposables. It takes 1 cup of crude oil to make the plastic for 1 disposable diaper. Taking that a bit further, it takes 286 lbs. of plastic (including diaper packaging) per year to supply 1 baby in disposable diapers.
- 18 Billion diapers are used and thrown into landfills each year—enough to stretch to the moon and back 9 times.
- Compared to cloth diapers, disposable diapers create 2.3 times as much water waste, use 3.5 times as much energy, use 8.3 times the non-regenerable raw materials, use 90 times the renewable raw materials, and use 4 to 30 times as much land for growing raw materials.
- It takes between 200-500 years for disposable diapers to decompose when exposed to direct sunlight and air. Since the diapers are dumped into landfills, covered and not exposed to sun or air, nobody knows how many thousands of years they will be around.
- The super-absorbent qualities of disposable diapers are not the boon they seem to be. Super-absorbent disposable diapers do three things:
- Facilitate less diaper changing from parents, which leads to rashes because of babies’ exposure to the super-absorbent chemicals, bacterial growth, and the ammonia from accumulated urine in the diaper.
- Reduce air circulation and pull natural moisture (not just urine) from the baby’s skin—this too will encourage irritation.
- Raise the temperature of a baby boy’s scrotum far above body temperature, to the point that it stops his testicles from developing normally, according to a study published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
- Disposable diapers contain Sodium Polyacrylate – This is the chemical, added in powder form to the inner pad of a disposable, that makes it super-absorbent. When the powder becomes wet, it turns into a gel which:
- Can absorb up to 100X its weight in water.
- Can stick to baby’s genitals, causing allergic reactions.
- Can cause severe skin irritations, oozing blood from perineum and scrotal tissues, fever, vomiting and staph infections in babies.
- When injected into rats, it has caused hemorrhage, cardiovascular failure and death.
- Was banned from tampons in 1985 because of its link to Toxic Shock Syndrome.
- Has killed children after ingesting as little as 5 grams of it.
- Disposable diapers also contain Dioxin – This is the chemical by-product of the paper-bleaching process, using chlorine gas, in the manufacturing of diapers. Dioxin is carcinogenic—a cancer-causing chemical. In fact, the EPA lists it as the MOST TOXIC of all cancer-linked chemicals. In small quantities it causes birth defects, skin/liver disease, immune system suppression & genetic damage in lab animals. Dioxin is banned in most countries, but not the United States.
- Disposable diapers contain Tributyl Tin (TBT) – An environmental pollutant, considered highly toxic, that spreads through the skin and has a hormone-like effect in the smallest concentrations. TBT harms the immune system and impairs the hormonal system, and it is speculated that it could cause sterility in boys.
From all angles, cloth diapering is a far better alternative to disposables—even the so-called “green” ones made of unbleached paper and cotton. A good cloth diapering system consisting of 24-36 cloth diapers will usually cost you between $200-500 dollars up front, but you will not need to continue to buy them, and you can save them for use with future children. Cloth diapers in good condition also have great resale value on e-Bay and other mommy resource sites.
Today’s cloth diapers are as varied and effective as any disposable—and they often come in cute colors and prints! With modern velcro and PUL nylon covers, the old diaper pins and sweaty, plastic pants are a thing of the past. The new cloth diapers clean up easily in regular and high-efficiency washing machines, using less water than would be required to flush the toilet each time your baby went to the bathroom. You can learn more about cloth diaper systems at Nicki’s Diapers and see how mommy’s rate them at the Diaper Pin.
Diaper-Free Babies
If you want to deal with baby poop in the most environmentally friendly and cost-effective manner, don’t diaper at all! Almost all non-Western cultures practice some form of elimination communication (EC), where mommies learn their babies’ cues for going to the bathroom just as they would learn their cues for hunger or sleepiness, and hold them over a potty when they need to go. Many progressive parents in the U.S. are also practicing EC, avoiding the need for diapers altogether, and enjoying fully potty-savvy children by the age of one!
Learn more about Elimination Communication and Diaper-Free Babies
This post is part of the Green Moms Carnival hosted this month by Mindful Momma!
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EC is definitely the way to go. We started at 8 weeks and learned our daughter’s cues for bowel movements early on. Since then we could probably count on two hands the number of poopy diapers we have changed since we started, that alone made EC worth it.
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