Green Adventures: Diaper Changes (Part 1)

A series in which we invite you into the adventures from our journey.

Diaper Changes (Part 1)

Many of the changes that we make to care for God’s creation are really quite easy.  Often it only means purchasing one product instead of another.  For example, buying LED or compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescents.  Other times it is just a subtle change in habit like remembering to switch off lights and unplug electronics that are not being used.  However, there are other times where it is much more difficult and it really challenges us to go green.  The reality is that caring for creation often comes at a cost.  And our latest adventure is one that I think will definitely come at a cost.

My wife and I have wanted to change to more eco-friendly diapers for a long time.  In fact, we were really looking into it a year or so ago but couldn’t pull the trigger.  Since almost everyone we know uses one of the same two brands of disposable diapers there was a sense of fear about what lay beyond the known world.  It was like we were embarking into some dark chasm of the unknown world of alternative diapers.  Somehow it slipped our minds and before we knew it another year had passed.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, disposable diapers are really awful for the environment.  The short of it is that it takes them ages to break down, they preserve bacteria and whatnot which can get into water that may not be treated properly, and they take up a ton of space in our landfills.  Most of the time there is just no beating things that we reuse versus things that we throw away in terms of carbon footprint and environmental cost.  This seems to be one of those times.  Did I mention how stinking expensive disposable diapers are?  Even when you buy them from discount stores in the largest packages possible (which at least reduces packaging) they are not cheap (about 20-25 cents each).  Not to mention that babies use a lot of them each day.  My daughter, who is almost 2, uses about 5 a day, but it was easily twice that when she was really little.  Well, that really adds up my friends.

So, recently the whole area of diapers came up again as we targeted new areas of our life to change in order to better care for God’s creation.  We looked into the more eco-friendly disposable diapers.  We discovered however that even the “eco diapers” came at a steep cost.  There were certainly improvements over regular diapers, don’t get me wrong, but to be honest they just seemed like minor incremental changes.  It’s nice that they are chlorine-free and are made from better materials.  Unfortunately, however, they just did not seem to do the trick and ultimately still wind up making our landfills a little taller and smellier.

We kept looking.  Of course, there aren’t too many more places to look.  There are really only 2 other options; well, 3 if you are okay with your toddlers walking around naked, conducting their business wherever they please.  The first (and better if you can pull it off) is to potty train your child early.  In our case, our daughter is not yet ready for that step.  If your child is, more power to you.  Using the toilet would certainly be the best option.  The second is to move to cloth diapers.  At this point we were past the point of no return.  We had decided to move forward but did not know it would cost us so much.  We were slipping head first into a big pile of… well, at least they are made of cotton.  So, we made it official.  We were moving into the world of cloth, non-disposable diapers.  A world that is much more complicated.  A world that takes a lot more work.  A world in which my likelihood of getting human excrement on myself is much higher.  But a world which is much cheaper (we expect to recover the initial cost outlay in about 3/4 of a year) and which, more importantly, will help us to better care for God’s creation.  And so our latest adventure began.

[Continue reading past the break to follow the rest of this phase of our adventure.]

While we were resolute in our decision – I must be honest – I was nervous about what we were doing.  All we have ever used are disposable diapers.  You put them on, baby fills them up, you throw them out.  It doesn’t get an simpler or more familiar than that.  But now, we are journeying into something totally foreign and seemingly much more complicated.  I didn’t even know what to buy, where to buy it, or how to use it.  Fortunately my wife (what would I do without her) remembered a blog post she had read a while back that really helped us through the process.  The Lazy Mom’s Guide to Cloth Diapering walked us through some of the main options and weighed the pros and cons for us.  This certainly opened the way for us to walk down a trail that we soon realized had already been blazed by many pioneers.

After much research and mulling over the options, we decided that bumGenius diapers were the best option for us (at least we hope they are).  So we proceeded to Amazon to buy them.  We tracked down the product, found a 20 pack (which seemed right for us), and went to add it to our cart when out of nowhere we hit a huge wall.  It was not the price that we were hung up on.  Nor was it the brand.  Nor was it the amount of diapers.  Rather it was the colors that came in the packages.  I had just assumed that we would get the boy package while my wife wanted the girl package.  You see, we do our best not to get sucked into the whole idea that you should buy a girl version of the toy car, stroller, toy, etc and then when you have a boy later buy the same exact thing in a more masculine shade.  We feel that this is mostly a marketing ploy to get more money from us, which results in greater and totally unnecessary consumption.  So we often try to go neutral so that things will work for the next kid(s).  So I was trying to work out of this principle and thought that the boy colors were more neutral.  Meanwhile, my wife noticed that the boy colors are quite bold and would look lame if our daughter wore a skirt or dress.  Besides, she thought, our (potential) boy would never wear a skirt thus hiding the occasional pink diaper.  But, I pointed out that babies go around only wearing a diaper often enough that he might be caught in pink (in fact 8 of the 20 were a shade of pink).  But what’s wrong with him wearing pink she said…  You get where this conversation went, don’t you?

After a short break, my wife saved our marriage and pointed out that if we bought from Cotton Babies instead we could buy a 12 pack and a 6 pack in which we could choose each individual color.  In the end we wound up with 18 bumGenius diapers, of which only 1 was pink.  Problem solved.

As we look forward to this adventure, I find that I am filled with a variety of hopes and fears.  Here are my thoughts, rational or not:

Hopes

1. I am terribly excited about the amazing difference we can make in God’s creation.  You see, for us this is about more than the coming months we have until my daughter is potty-trained but is about the next kid or two that we hope to have.  This has the potential to make a small but significant dent in a landfill and mean many fewer resources and chemicals used and discarded.  Ultimately, I hope God is pleased by this decision.

2. I hope that it will be a quick transition.  My desire is to quickly get into the new habits that this will require of us.  I am banking on that it will be like composting where it is just a part of my routine now rather than a burden that I regret each time I change a diaper.

3. I hope that this will help curb other disposable tendencies that I have.  Think of all the things we dispose of easily:  plastic bags, food, relationships.  I am hoping that this new habit will rub off in other areas.

4. I hope that others will be inspired by our efforts.  This may not even be that they themselves make the diaper switch, but I hope that we can give others courage to venture out into the unknown challenges of going green in their own lives and circumstances.

Fears

1. Let me be totally upfront with you.  My biggest fear is that we will fail, that we will not find a way to make this part of our lives, that we will have wasted the money to buy these (though the resources would not be wasted as we would surely give them to someone else) and resort back to disposable diapers.  I don’t even see this as an option at this point as I despise defeat.  However, my fear is that we will one day give up on this.  Please encourage us along the way.

2. I am afraid of what to do with diapers when in public places.  Obviously, wet diapers are easy.  And surely there are bags that you can put the dirty ones into.  I am more worried about those monstrous explosions that come every now and then.  What to do with a diaper that absolutely wreaks like death and you can’t throw it away.

3. I am also worried that they won’t contain my daughter’s uhh… byproducts in the same way.  Again, it’s not the wet diapers I am worried about so much as the massive diarrheal volcanoes that erupt without warning.  I hope these things do their job well (of course I have seen the best of the best in disposables fail plenty of times).

4. Finally, my inner germophobe comes out and worries about the more complex, vulnerable process.  Part of me really likes the ease of throwing away the bacteria, etc. never to be haunted by it again.  Now I will have to deal with the precarious task of carrying the goods to the toilet and trying my best to empty them with precision into the bowl without missing or, even worse, getting them on myself somehow.

I imagine my wife’s hopes and fears differ somewhat as she is not nearly as afraid of fecal matter as I am.  Perhaps she will chime in on the comments.

Here are a few additional resources for you if you decide to embark on this adventure yourself:

www.clothdiaper.com

www.cottonbabies.com

http://www.diaperjunction.com/

Our diapers just arrived today.  The real adventure begins tomorrow.  You can walk this journey with us over the coming weeks as I will continue to blog about how this all plays out.  Stay tuned and please wish us luck.

 
Also consider:

Green Adventures: You Melt My Heart

Green Adventures: Baking Bread

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