Benifits and Reasons to Cloth Diaper

There are many benefits and reasons for wanting to cloth diaper. I will give you some basic number, but Ill try not to bore you with too many. There are three main reasons that people choose to cloth – Environmental/Health factor, Cost factor, and Cute factor! For me it was a little bit of all of them.

Let’s start with the Environmental issue. Did you know that it takes 200 to 500 years for a disposal diaper to decompose in a landfill? One baby can produce over 2000lbs of waste a year, that’s a lot of poop! When I heard that I could not believe it! Our country is becoming all about preserving the world and cloth diapering is definitely one step in doing that. For Luke and me, we have slowly been changing our lifestyle over the last few years to eating mostly organic, recycling regularly and even using eco-friendly household product. Cloth diapering just became another step in all of that for our family.

Another part that goes with the environmental issue, is the Health factors as well. When I started learning more about cloth, I also started learning more about disposable diapers. There are so many chemicals, dyes and bleaches added to our babies disposable diapers! Have you ever looked at diaper box or bag? There is no ingredients list … hmmm.  Dyes, sodium polyacrylate (the super absorbent gel), and dioxin, which is a by-product of bleaching paper, are just some things found in disposable diapers.  Sodium polyacrylate, which has been linked in the past to toxic shock syndrome and allergic reactions, is no longer allowed in Tampons but is still used in disposable diapers. This is why babies get rashes and even burns from disposable. When using a cloth diaper, you know exactly what is going against your little babes skin!

 

Now onto one of the most convincing reasons to cloth, Cost Factor! Have you ever sat down and added up how much it costs you to diaper your child from birth to potty training? Disposable diaper estimates run between $60 to $80 a month depending on the brand of choice. That is between $750-$960 a year for diapering one child! Depending how long your child takes to potty train, it can seriously add up. Say your child doesn’t potty train until they are 3 years old, that means that you are spending anywhere from $2250 to $2880 in disposable diapers, ultimately money being thrown away.

I know one of the biggest things that scare/turn people off to Cloth diapering is the start up cost, but you have to look at it as an investment! It typically costs between $500 to $800 to cloth one child for their entire diaper life and almost all cloth diapers can be reused over and over for each child. You do not have to spend all of it at once if you do not want to. I knew from the beginning of my pregnancy that I wanted to cloth, so I would buy a little here and there to acquire my whole stash. I am closer to the $800 range because I went a little crazy at times ;) I have more diapers than most people say you need. (over 60 total) lol. This includes my newborn stash and my normal stash. There is about 30 in each.
Here is a good site that I found that talks about the costs of cloth vs disposable a bit more

http://cashmoneylife.com/cloth-diapers-vs-disposable-diapers/

Lastly, and yes this is an actual reason why people cloth diaper, Cute Factor! Have you seen some of the diapers out there?! ADORABLE! I definitely have been sucked into this one. I have diapers with owls, flowers, patterns and even a custom made one. Also, they come in every color under the sun. It is so much fun to match diapers with outfits or just admire a little fluff bum with no other clothes on J  - See what I mean!!

There is not just one of these factors that really made me want to cloth, it was a bit of all of them combined. It just really made sense for us to do it and thankfully Luke fully agreed once we started looking into it together. He is 110% on board with my cloth diapering adventure.