The Organic Baby Bum

I guess the first thing that made me an Alterna-Mom was my decision to use cloth diapers. Sixteen years ago(yes, sixteen), when I was pregnant, I knew I didn’t want to swaddle my baby’s rear in plastic. I credit my mom. Of course, when I was born, she didn’t really have a choice. Disposable diapers were around in 1968, but they gave my sensitive baby butt a tremendous rash. So I got the same cloth diapers that my older brother and sister used. My mom would talk about washing the diapers and hanging them on the line (remember clothes lines?) in winter and having to defrost the frozen rectangles before she could use them. How much easier, I thought, it would be for me with a dryer and modern conveniences like diaper shells and Velcro closures.

In the end, though, since I used a laundromat, I wound up using a diaper service. For the same price as disposables, I left out a big bag of dirty nappies every week and got a big bag of clean, cotton ones in return. With baby number two, I wanted to do the same thing, natch. I looked in the phone directory for National Diaper in Milltown. Out of Business. Somehow I thought that cloth diapers would be even more popular now, but the heady post-hippie era of the 90’s was replaced by something even more grim than Reaganomics. I speak, of course, of the Wal-Mart culture. Why use disposables when God has given us the Diaper Genie? (more on that later.) Finally, I found a diaper guy in North Jersey who agreed to deliver to my Old Bridge home. It was as good as I remembered-no diaper rash, no smelly disposables and all I had to do was remember to leave the bag out once a week.

Now, some people disagree with a diaper service. The trucks use gas, or diesel, the machines use more electricity, and bleach, too much water is used, etc. I used to buy into this, too. Then I read, in Mothering magazine, that the whole “clothe diapers are just as harmful as disposables, just in different ways” myth is just that-a big, fat myth. It seems, in 1990s, that Proctor & Gamble commissioned a study that found that cloth was actually more wasteful than “one-use diapers”. This was in response to a growing trend in the 80’s to actually outlaw disposables because they were found to cause more frequent and severe diaper rash (Pediatrics, September, 1979) and that “preexisting skin or breathing disorders may become aggravated through prolonged exposure” to SAP’s, or super absorbent polymers, which are used in disposables. (OSHA material safety data sheet on SAP’s). If you remember, these are the same ingredients that cause Toxic Shock Syndrom. Despite the fact that P&G’s study was flawed, they used it to start a publicity campaign to say that disposables are biodegradable and earth friendly. They even touted them as a “soil-enhacer”. Bosh. In the 40 years that disposables have been around, they now account for 2% of all solid waste in our landfills(EPA study) and some sources say that these disposables will take 500 years to decompose. The reality of cloth diapers is that they use no more water per diaper than flushing the toilet and they decompose in 6 months after being used many, many times.

All this brings me to the Diaper Genie. This may be the most environmentally evil product ever invented. For $30, you get a big plastic pail filled with a long plastic tube. Every dirty disposable is stuffed into the tube and given a twist. In the end, you have a long string of individually wrapped plastic diapers. Finally, a product that combines the worst qualities of disposable diapers with the worst of, say, sausages. 10,000 years from now, archaeologists will look through our landfills and see these diaper sausages. Unable to believe that any society could be so wasteful, they’ll invent fanciful reasons for them, like maybe we recycled our children’s waste into floatation devices or used them to contain oil slicks. Sigh.

Cotton diapers, whether you wash them yourself or use a service, are easy. I still diaper my baby old-school style: pins and waterproof pants or a woolen cover. There are multiple mail-order companies that provide all sorts of diapers and diaper covers: Mother-ease, Cottontail Babies, Happy Heiny’s and, of course, Fuzzi Bunz. Any web search on cloth diapers will bring up a variety of commercial sources. There are also many sites on making your own cotton diapers and diaper covers on the cheap. Karen’s Diaper Page (diaperpages.com) is a great resource to get you started. It also has great links. I knit and sew and have made my own wool soakers for very little money. Or go to my website, laughing-baby.blogspot.com for more info on cotton diapers and other attachment parenting links. Happy Heiny’s!