Many have stopped buying bottled water, and started eschewing Yet so many of us are still convinced by the ads to use
a misnomer.
“disposable” diapers, even if
plastic packaging whenever we can.
the very name is
and starch-based glue 52
—are flushable or biodegradable.
On her Cotton Babies blog (http://clothdiapers.blogspot. com/2009/09/
are-flip-disposable-inserts.html), cofounder Jenn Labit recommends you compost them in a flower garden. Although she has been criticized by environ- mentalists and cloth-diaper advocates, Labit insists that the Flip actually helps parents keep their babies in cloth:
Even the
biggest makers of
microbusinesses with a fraction of the
advertising budgets
of P&G and
Kimberly-Clark. They don’t have the
resources
to launch
the kind of
advertising campaign that can
behavior
practically
overnight.
change
diapers are
cloth
“People who are in disposable diapers are more likely to take the step into cloth if you can build a bridge,” Labit says. “If you have the reusable product at home, we find our customers not taking them on the road, because they don’t want to haul around poopy diapers. We’ve kept the package small enough that it is good for travel, but not enough to become a habit.”53 Yet Alma Gordillo, who had two children in diapers
“Would you wear plastic underwear
all day long?”
LORI TAYLOR
REAL DIAPER ASSOCIATION
habits and are striving to change them. Many of us now bring our own mugs to the coffee shop, and our own reusable bags to the grocery store. Many have stopped buying bottled water, and started eschewing plastic packaging whenever we can. Yet so many of us are still convinced by the ads to use “disposable” diapers, even if the very name is a misnomer: You can’t dispose of them, and when you throw them “away,” they don’t go anywhere. It’s time to stop using the fallacy of convenience as a reason to put human waste in landfills and wrap our babies’ genitals in plastic. Perhaps Lori Taylor of the Real Diaper Associa- tion put it best: “Would you wear plastic
underwear all day long?” At any given moment our baby has something differ-
at the same time, has traveled all over the world— including Norway, Mexico City, and across the US— without using a single disposable or hybrid diaper. When I talked to her about it, I felt inspired that, with a little advance planning, of course it’s possible to travel with cloth. She would use prefolds and covers, bring a waterproof drawstring bag full of clean cloth diapers, and two other Wet Happened? waterproof bags (one for soiled diapers, one for wet ones), and wash the dia- pers with the rest of the family’s laundry. “You have to change the diaper anyway and then do something with it,” Gordillo said. “I see people change diapers and leave dirty diapers in regular trash cans, but you aren’t sup- posed to throw human waste in the trash can. It’s so gross. Even if I used disposable diapers, I wouldn’t be throwing them away in a public place, so I would have to be carrying them around anyway.” As tempting as it is for cloth-diaper advocates to criti-
cize diaper companies that claim to be eco-friendly but make disposable products, it’s important to remember that even the biggest makers of cloth diapers are micro- businesses with a fraction of the advertising budgets of P&G and Kimberly-Clark. Tey don’t have the resources to launch the kind of advertising campaign that can change behavior practically overnight. Still, as a soci- ety, we are becoming more aware of our unsustainable
66 mothering | May–June 2010
ent on her tush. It may be a raggedy prefold from when her oldest sister was born, a Kushies AIO I picked up at a children’s consignment shop for less than half price (about $6/diaper), a hand-me-down Mother-ease, or a new JamTot some friends chipped in to buy us. We’ve also been practicing elimination communication, which has been working so well that more than 90 percent of the time the baby poops not in a diaper but in a little chamber pot. Nor do we use disposable wipes: Wash- cloths with warm water work just as well. We soak poopy diapers in gray water, and wash the diapers along with the rest of the family’s clothes, in cold water with biodegradable soap. Tough some cloth users find they need to wash diapers with their wash cycles set to WARM or HOT to get the soap off and avoid rash, our baby has been rash-free since birth. At night I load her up with an extra prefold, and sometimes put a cloth pad protec- tor under her—or I put her in a Mother-ease without a cover, and when it’s wet I take it off, throw it in the direction of the hamper (I do this without getting up), and put on another one. For Alma Gordillo, changing cloth diapers has
always been a labor of love. In fact, she loves them too much to part with them. “I’m keeping some of my diapers for my kids in a hope chest,” she told me.
“I’m keeping them as part of a time capsule to show them: ‘Tis was your childhood and this was your life.’ Tey’re that special.”
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