Our journey began before Joseph was born. Rochester is fortunate to have an actual cloth diaper store, Luvaboos (visit their website if you're curious!), which allowed us to go see the diapers in person. They sell a lot of other cool organic and earth-friendly baby and mom products too. My first experience was buying some gifts for my cousin's wife's baby shower, and it was rather overwhelming! I came back to the store with my husband, Joe, for their “cloth diapering 101” class, where we learned about the different types of cloth diapers and the benefits. Here’s a summary of the benefits we learned about:
- Cost benefits: To be honest, this is the main reason we went with cloth. The Luvaboos comparison showed us that we could save several thousand dollars by using cloth. My simplified comparison (with approximate numbers from our actual purchases) is below:
Cloth diaper costs:
26 one-size pocket diapers @ approx. $20 each = $520
4 wet bags @ $20 each = $80
Diaper sprayer ($30) + Cloth wipes ($32) = $62
Increased water costs (+$10 every 3 months over 2 years) = $80
Diaper-friendly detergent ($0.30/load x about 243 loads in 2 years) = $73
Hemp inserts (for overnight) = $35
Cloth-diaper friendly diaper rash cream (projected cost for 2 years) = $104
Grand total of about $954.
Disposable costs:
Assuming 8 diapers/day over 2 years (8 diapers x 730 days = 5,840 diapers used) x Average cost per diaper of $0.21 (based on Sam’s Club prices) = $1,226.40.
Add to that the cost of wipes ($0.025 per wipe x 10 wipes/day x 730 days = $182.50), a diaper genie with its little weenie bags ($25 + $144 = $169), and traditional diaper rash cremes (let’s say $60 over 2 years) equals...
Grand total of about $1,638.
The difference: $1,638 - 954 = $684 saved. (In actuality, probably a bit more.)
Other savings: 5,000 less diapers in a landfill. AND - I can reuse the diapers for baby #2!
- Health benefits: One of the key benefits from our point of view was less chemicals on baby’s skin. Yes, you can buy chlorine-free disposable diapers, but most disposables have lots of chemicals in them. We did use disposables for the first 6 weeks however, as 1) meconium is nasty to clean up and 2) we were given a diaper cake for our baby shower and felt obligated to use it. We also have used disposables when we went on a family road trip instead of trying to clean cloth diapers on the road (although we switched back to cloth on the day we were traveling home). Joseph didn’t seem to mind either type particularly but I did notice that he seemed to get rashy with the disposables. (However, he tends to get rashy in his leg area anyway, so that’s not a conclusive argument against disposables.)
- Sustainability/"green" benefits: Less trash in a landfill. Reusing instead of disposing. The list goes on. (However, more water is used to wash the diapers, so that could be a downside. But I’m pretty sure that the water can be ‘cleaned’ and reused for something, and it’s still better than putting tons of plastic into a landfill!)
- Other benefits: We’ve heard rumors that it’s easier to potty train when using cloth (I’ll have to post if that’s true for us when the time comes!). And yes, one psuedo-benefit is that the diapers are cute with a capital C!
