Thursday, April 22

The Dirt on Diapers

It's Earth Day, did you know? Apparently I didn't, 'cause I thought it was last week. Which started my week of diaper blogging. In case you forgot why I love cloth diapers...

- they save me money
- they save trees, and don't take up room in a landfill
- they hold poop better, and are nicer for my boy's skin
- they are easy to use
- they are stinkin' cute

Sure. All of those things are great. But for many people, the big hang up with cloth diapers, is the laundry. Here are the two laundry-related reasons people have given me for not wanting to use cloth:

"You put the poopy diapers IN YOUR WASHER!!!! ewwwwwwwwwwww. I'd feel like I needed TWO washers - one for the poopy diapers, and one for my clothes."

"But, all that extra laundry....?"

And here are my responses:

Washers are for washing. Washing dirty things. Dirty things like diapers. When a baby is being breastfed, the poop washes off no problem, and once they move to solids, you can roll the poop into a toilet before tossing the diaper in your pail. And if the diapers come out of the washer clean, I'm pretty certain the inside of your washer is clean by the end of the cycle too. I have yet to find poop on my clothes.

And what about all the extra laundry? I don't do that much diaper laundry. I do more laundry because I've been puked on than I do diapers. We have 20 diapers. Every 2-3 days, I remove the bag from my pail, walk downstairs, put the diapers and the bag, into the washer, press the start button, and walk away. An hour and a half later, I return, put the diapers in the dryer for awhile. If it's a nice sunny day, I'll toss them in the dryer for 20 minutes or so just to soften them up, then hang them in the sun - it bleaches out the poop stains. If it's not nice out, or I don't have the time, they take about 1hr and 20minutes to dry in the dryer. I have a second pail liner that I put in while the other one is washing. So, really...it's not that much work. I remove the bag from the bin (which, last I checked, you have to do with disposables...unless someone has some great system in which you drop the diaper into the pail and it disappears forever. If you do, you might be able to convince me to switch.) I carry the bag downstairs (you have to take the disposable diapers out of the pail and out to the curb, right? same amount of work so far). I wash the diapers. They don't sit in my house all week getting stinky and gross.

If you reallyREALLY can't handle the "extra work" of washing diapers, there are diaper services! And, believe it or not, they are STILL cheaper than disposables - about $25/week or less. Here are two in the area:
Comfy Cotton
Bear Bottoms

I have one post to come...some cloth diapering resources. Links, stores, etc. Check it out!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts with Thumbnails