"Ew, disposables make so much trash! Cloth must be more eco- friendly!"
"Yeah, but on the other hand, what about all the water and energy it takes to launder cloth? Is it really much better?"
"Well, trash is really bad."
"But water is precious."
"TRASH!"
"WATER!"
...you get the idea. Every few years a new study fans the flames, inevitably funded by either Proctor & Gamble, a plastic company, or a paper mill (who all find disposables better) or some cotton grower's consortium or laundry service (who of course, favor cloth).
About a year ago this new product came on the scene: gDiapers, which are a sort of combination of the two. They come with a washable, re-usable outer covering that tends to last all day and a FLUSHABLE inner core made from eco-friendly, biodegradable stuff. They argue that this is better than both cloth and disposable because the outer cover doesn't need to be laundered nearly as much (or with hot water and caustic agents, which cloth needs to get really clean) and the icky part gets flushed (into the system we already have set up for prote
cting the water supply from human waste and re-claiming recycled waste water for new purposes) instead of heading off to a landfill (where even the biodegradable diapers will live on for hundreds of years). At first, I was a huge skeptic. It sounded like a way to make plumbers money with clogged toilets... I pretty much forgot about them.But now, I am actually going to have my own kid and therefore the debate is much less academic to me. Also, I couldn't seem to get to sleep last night. :) So I searched Treehugger for the latest in the diaper debates and I learned that gDiapers just became the very first consumer packaged good in the world to receive the prestigious environmental accreditation of Cradle-to-Cradle certification!! (It's like the environmental Oscars, but instead of being based on votes, they do a lifecycle analysis of how the product is made, used, and what happens to it when you are finished with it. They've also been endorsed by the NRDC.) And now that they've been out for a year, there are plenty of parents out there reviewing them on message boards and stuff and they are actually wildly popular with regular people--I haven't heard any users complain about clogging toilets!!!
So the votes are in, we're going to have a gDiaper baby! Look how cute they are:
AWESOME!!!
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm just too extreme in my opinion about this because I used cloth diapers only and really believe they are best but I don't think there is much difference between the gDiapers and disposables. You are still flushing away a almost as much as you would be trashing with disposables. From the picture, you are still dealing with lots of wasted paper or whatever they are made from. You might want to consider that before you go to these semi-disposable diapers.
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly what I thought at first--exactly! It just seemed like a sort of different packaging on essentially a throw-away item. I couldn't figure out why environmentalists were so excited about these!
ReplyDeleteThat's because I wasn't seeing a difference between flusing and trashing. But, as I learned, there is one! It's all about where the stuff ends up. Trash goes to landfills where it piles up, doesn't biodegrade, and then leaches into groundwater. Sewage, on the other hand, goes to special treatment facilities where it's processes, cleaned, and in my city, largely reclaimed for use in public/industrial projects. So when you toss a disposable, it's just going on top of the pile. When you flush a Gdiaper, it's essentially getting re-used (in a very different form.) And since flushing takes much less water and electricity, the net result is an environmental edge over cloth. That's right, and edge. Now, of course, I wouldn't have been able to figure out the "environmental edge" part on my own--there are too many unknowns for me to figure something like that up. But the friendly scientists over at the National Resources Defense Council did it for me! Google it, you can see their report, it's pretty intresting--it goes into detail on the precise impact of four baby poo solutions (cloth, disposable, G, and "diaper free parenting" which I am not even going to get into because it's another topic for another... universe.)
Love ya, thanks for the comment!!
And hey, no one can be "too extreme" for me in terms of considering environmental impact! (Okay, maybe that girl who lived in a tree for three years... but maybe not...)
:)