Babble

Been through many kids, all with cloth diapers and some disposables for traveling.  Disposable pull-ups are great once the kids are walking.  Our cloth diapers came from a diaper service.  They did the enviro-friendly cleaning methods from way back.  Leev is right:  you should be emptying and/or rinsing the diaper in the toilet, no matter whether it is cloth or disposable.  Cloth diapers meant we changed our kids more often - saved a lot on Desitin expenditures (reduced diaper rash).

Jah

Although it makes sense that I should be doing something about the poo in the disposable diapers prior to pitching them, I never, ever heard of this before.  Disposables have that super-absorbent polymer junk in the middle and if I go to rinse it out, won't it just absorb more liquid and therefore be larger and take up more space in the trash?  As it is, I roll them up as small and tight as I can get them.

Does it make a difference that it's breastmilk-poop and therefore not um, chunky? 

I've never heard of rinsining disposables but you are supposed to shake & dump loose poop in the toilet. Our wastewater system is designed to handle the disposalof poop and it's bacterial/viral contaminants. Our landfills aren't. It seeps out as leachate into the ground and ground water.  Breastfed poop can contain the same biohazards, it's just harder to dump it. I belive the packages for disposables recommend this. Or I think they did once.

I was so excited about gdiapers and ordered a bunch when the baby was born.  Unfortunately we had a real problem with leaks.  We kept trying to use them over the first few months (in the hopes that they would fit better) but the leaks kept coming.  Have you had this problem?  My husband refuses to use cloth so we've been using the 7th Generation diapers.

We never used Gdiapers with a newborn. They work really well for the bigger kids (toddlers.) I started using them when my son had turned one, we only had a leak issue once but that was because we were out and I forgot to bring an extra insert.

What do you mean by "loads?" My kid kid makes three loads a day.  Plus, I don't know how many pee-pees!

I only used cloth for a month or two with my daughter, just because we didn't have laundry in our apartment.  We don't live in a crunchy area, so anyone who knows you use cloth thinks yo are nuts.  I love cloth!  And I'm excited to use them on this baby, too.  My husband won't use them, so I'll have disposables, too.

When asked why I wanted to do cloth, I really couldn't say why.  It's not environmental (some is economical).   My daughter's bottom fared much better with cloth, maybe because I changed her more often (though we changed her more in 'sposies than most parents do), or maybe because of the chemicals.

I'm just busy saving up for covers for a newborn, and pull-up style for overnights for my potty-trained 2 year old. 

We're in the 4th month of using cloth diapers--we use the pocket diapers (Fuzzi Bunz) and regular/prefolds with Bummi covers. We love 'em, and are planning on sticking with the Fuzzi Bunz as she grows and needs bigger sizes. We're saving $$, they're easier on her skin (for all the above cited reasons), and they're easier on the environment. We have a washer/dryer in the house, and this adds an extra load every three days, which is no big deal at all. Plus, our babe looks so cute with her big puffy cloth-clad butt--when I have used disposables (on the road a few times), her butt looks so weird. (And her poops came blasting right out of those wimpy things). She's starting part-time day care soon, and I'm hoping the provider will be willing to use the Fuzzi Bunz (they snap right on, easy as cake) and we won't have to get more disposables.

 

I switched to cloth when my daughter was six months old and never looked back. The more I learned about it, the more it just made sense for our family. With cloth she never had diaper rash and potty-trained at 2 1/2 yrs old. I plan to use cloth with the next babe from day one.

My wife and I discussed this issue prior to the birth of our daughter, my being an environmentally friendly (but not fanatic) vegetarian obviously swayed me towards cloth diapers.  However, we discovered quite quickly that even in a large city like Los Angeles, there weren't very many choices for a delivery service.  We do not own our own washer/dryer, so cleaning diapers ourselves wasn't really an option either (we both work full time).

PLUS, I did a large amount of research that basically says that the manufacturing and cleaning process for cloth diapers has just as much, if not more enviornmental impact than disposables. 

 So we're buying Pampers on a regular basis.  I don't mind the Sesame Street characters on the diapers, we hardly ever see them.  And hey, there's rewards points inside for free stuff, and I'm a sucker for free stuff.

 

Yes, we just started using cloth diapers with our 8 week-old daughter. We chose to wait until we had a few weeks of parenthood under our belts before adding the task of washing diapers. Plus my little one was too small to fit into the small Fuzzi Bunz we have. So far, cloth diapering is great! Fuzzi Bunz are really good at wicking the moisture away from baby's bottom, and both the diapers and the inserts can be hung up to dry, so I'm not using the dryer much more than I was before. I read somewhere that you don't actually need to change a cloth-diapered baby any more than you would with disposables, cloth-diapering just keeps you honest about how often baby should be changed.

We've used cloth since our son was about a week old.  Initially I had a stash that I laundered but when I discovered that the local diaper service was cheaper than coin laundromats (no washer/dryer in our apartment), we switched.  I work full time and my partner is a full time student, so it's nice to have a little less laundry (although it wouldn't be bad if we actually had our own washer/dryer).  The diaper service is cheaper than disposables, as well.

 I have heard that it's easier to potty train kids with the cloth diapers, too, so that is exciting.  We used disposables during xmas out of town and it drove me nuts that it was so difficult to tell when his diaper was wet.  I really prefer cloth!

We've been using cloth nappies (daipers to you Americans) from day one on our 10 month old daughter - the hospital/birth centre we were at started us off that way and we've just kept going. We've got a few fitted ones, but for the most part we just use the traditional terry toweling cloth squares.

We researched extensively during pregnancy, and there's just no way you can compare the environmental impact of disposable to cloth - our initial outlay of about 60 nappies (which will last us at least a year and a half, probably a lot more), washed using a front-loader machine just doesn't compare with the thousands of disposables that we'd chew through before she toilet trains. Especially considering the bleaches and chemicals involved in disposal manufacture, and the impact of their disposal in landfills.  If you're concerned with the environmental imapct of cotton cloth nappy manufacture, you can also find hemp nappies, or unbleached nappies.

As far as effort goes, we have no problems throwing on an extra few loads of washing a week, and, with the exception of a couple of long flights we all had to go on, have rarely had to resort to disposables.  When we have, we've been able to find biodegradables that have seen us through.  Also, our daughter's never had a nappy rash that amounted to more than a touch of redness lasting no more than a day or so.

...and yes, it don't hurt at all that cloth nappied babies tend to toilet train much, much sooner than disposabled.  Looking forward to that.

We've exclusively cloth diapered for over a year, and love it.  It's cheap, easy, and quite effective (no blowouts or rashes so far).  I'm always surprised at people who say it's more work (an extra two loads of laundry a week is not that much work), and frankly when I hear people say that cloth diapers are worse for the environment than disposables, I wonder what they're smoking (or perhaps what diaper manufacturer-funded "report" they are reading) and I suspect that is a bit of willful ignorance that maybe makes them feel "justified" in using disposables.  Go ahead and use disposables if you want to, but don't try to claim they're just as good or better than cloth for the environment.

pipu:

...and frankly when I hear people say that cloth diapers are worse for the environment than disposables, I wonder what they're smoking (or perhaps what diaper manufacturer-funded "report" they are reading)

Yeah, I tend to think that the same company that is actively convincing 3rd world mothers that breastfeeding is "unhealthy" so they'll buy formula milk they can't afford is running a similar disinformation strategy for disposables vs cloth.

Could be paranoia, but I somehow doubt it.