The Great Diaper Debate
CLOTH VS. DISPOSABLE
Diapers, whatever their shapes or stripes, are big business--to the tune of some 3,650 diaper changes a year per baby! So cloth or disposable? It pays to reframe the terms of the debate, deciding what the various trade-offs are worth for you and your family.
Convenience
Tracy, from Olathe, cites convenience as the main advantage of disposables. Disposables come ready-shaped and sized, fasteners included and, well, they’re disposable!
Melissa, another Olathe mom, used both disposables and cloth for both of her children before switching entirely to cloth. She says, “Pins, folding and plastic covers are a thing of the past. Snappis [a grip fastener] and AIOs (All-in-ones) have made cloth diapering as simple as using a disposable.”
But the diapers are only reusable if you wash them, so the laundering convenience needs to be factored in as well. You may need a diaper load in the laundry 2-3 times a week. Still, for $20 a week within the I-435 Metro area, Andrea Jones’ B.A. Cloth Diapering provides diapers, wipes, covers, a wetbag (travel bag), diaper pail and weekly bleach- and chemical-free washing. For about the same price as disposables, in other words, you can enjoy the convenience of cloth.
Cost
If you buy your own, cloth diapers seem to have the advantage over disposables in the cost arena, with an up front investment for years of returns. Erica Frans teaches Shopping Smart Workshops and says: “they just make sense financially.” Melissa made her own, and then sold them after her two children no longer needed them. Look for opportunities to buy used cloth diapers.
Health
Disposables wick moisture away from baby’s skin to keep it dry, which may reduce skin irritations. However, they use chemicals to accomplish this feat.
Cloth diapers breathe, allowing air to get to baby’s skin. Erica Frans writes that she found them to be gentler on her baby’s skin. Melissa cites “the health benefits of all natural (and often organic) fibers” as a factor in her choice of cloth.
Many childcare providers will not work with cloth diapers, but Becky Stahl, director of early childhood services at the Family Resource Center, one of the largest childcare providers in Kansas, says that a number of their children use cloth diapers. The same regulations of the Kansas Department of Health (Bureau of Consumer Health, Childcare Licensing and Registration) govern pull-ups as well: they are allowable, but cannot be rinsed at the facility. Instead, cloth diapers must be bagged or placed in a covered container and labeled and returned to the parent or guardian.
If cloth diapers are catching up in convenience, disposables—the bigger polluter in terms of landfill tonnage and oil-based plastics—are catching up in environmental health. Cloth laundering is an environmental pollutant as well. But disposables are getting “greener.” Chlorine-free disposables are now easy to find in stores like Overland Park’s Whole Foods Market. Nature Babycare also sells a new 60 percent biodegradable disposable based on GM-free corn.
Best of both …
And if you like compromise, you may like g-Diapers, a cloth-disposable hybrid. They use a “g-Pant” with either reusable cotton inserts or disposable inserts you can “home compost, toss or flush” because they biodegrade quickly. But Theresa, from Brookside, warns your plumbing may not be ready for the future: “In all fairness to g-Diapers, their Website does explain that if you have certain kinds of plumbing you should not flush g-Diapers, but in my enthusiasm for the product, I chose to ignore that little detail.”
Casie Hermansson writes from her home in Pittsburg, KS.