Cloth is Cool

Last week Nate and I made a big decision. We've switched to cloth diapers. With Avery we would spend $40 or so on disposables every other week and hated it.

It's awesome. Not only is it easy and great for the environment, but we are saving a boat load of money. Let's pretend we went ahead and used disposables with Paul for a second. 2.5 years at $100 a month (the average is $85-$135) equals $3000 in diapers that stink, don't work well, leach chemicals and end up in a landfill (which take approximately 500 years to decompose by the way). Hmmm...that seems awfully expensive.

Now, let's say that we had one heck of a cloth diaper stash - 24 all in ones. Those are the most similar to disposables, the easiest to use. For the sake of argument, let's also say that we chose a very spendy diaper. That would rack up to about $500. That's a $2500 saving so far. But wait, it gets better. You can make a lot back on your investment. Yes, cloth diapers are sold used, a lot! I'm going to be on the low side and say we get 50% back. So now you've spend $250 and saved over $2750 and the world a whole lot of space.

How much space, you ask? I'm being generous in favor of disposables here for fairness. Let's say the average baby is changed 6 times a day for a course of 2.5 years. I don't know about you, but most babies I know are changed more often than every four hours and many kids over 2.5 that aren't yet using the potty. I am also not including training pants or Pull-ups in this example. That's 5600 diapers in a landfill somewhere.

So if you don't use cloth, I urge you to at least look into and consider it. They are easy to use, easy to care for and you will be eliminating harmful chemicals from both your baby and the Earth.