The Diaper Dilemma: Disposable, Cloth, or “Hybrid”?

Readers of last issue’s column about raising children in nontoxic, sustainable ways have asked me to follow up with thoughts about one of the omnipresent realities of parenthood: diapers.

The debate used to be cloth versus disposable. Now the picture is a little more complex because the categories have expanded. Disposable diapers generally are made from bleached tree-farm wood fiber, petroleum-based polypropylene, adhesives, synthetic rubber, and sodium polyacrylate crystals (for absorbency). The main draw is that they are incredibly convenient. The green side: Some diapers, such as those from Seventh Generation, are made with unbleached fibers. The downside: All go into landfills, making diapers the third-largest contributor to landfill garbage nationally; excrement goes into landfills without being treated as a biohazard; the diapers take hundreds of years to decompose; bleaching is a very toxic process; and the diapers are a single-use product requiring tree-farm wood fiber, petroleum products, and other materials, as well as the use of resources (energy, water, etc.) and thereby creation of pollutants in making a new diaper. I’m not a big fan of these, as you might be able to guess. One additional note—hundreds of studies have shown sodium polyacrylate crystals to be entirely nontoxic to humans and nature, but none have analyzed the effects of absorption through the skin, which may be a factor in Toxic Shock Syndrome.

In the distant past, using cloth diapers necessitated nasty diaper dunks in toilets to get rid of hangers-on, so to speak, the hazards of not-so-safe safety pins, and lots and lots of laundry. No more. Those who do use cloth diapers now usually use a diaper service, such as The Cotton Club (www.cottonclubdiapers.com), which serves all of Butte County and up to Corning and down to Yuba City. Pampered Earth Diaper Service (www.pamperedearth.vpweb.com) covers Nevada County. Here’s how it works: Once a week you get a new batch of clean diapers. You use an exterior wrap, often made of polyurethane-coated polyester and held together with Velcro or snaps, over the cotton diaper. When the diaper is soiled Number One, you just put the cotton diaper into the diaper pail and forget about it. When it’s Number Two, the diaper service does ask you to try to dislodge what you can before you put the diaper in the diaper pail, but I’ve never resorted to toilet dunks, and those good folks have not asked it of me. At the end of the week, out go the bags of soiled diapers, and new bags show up that same day. Sound easy? You do have to launder the wraps, which can get a little messy at times, but that’s nothing like doing all the diapers yourself, as my parents did. The green side: Diapers do not go to landfills for a good while—after their useful life, they can be also used as rags; the diapers biodegrade in less than a year; wraps tend to get passed around secondhand; poop goes to a sewage-treatment plant, which is a much better place for this biological hazard than a landfill; and there’s no plastic involved. Unfortunately, there is no organic cotton option offered locally. The downside: There is a good bit of water and energy used per wash, though industrial-sized washers and dryers are more efficient than home models; bleaching of cotton diapers is very toxic; cotton is a very pesticide-intensive crop, using up to 10 percent of all the pesticides used in the world every year; and the wraps will take decades, if not hundreds of years, to decompose when their reuse is through.

There now exists what some call a “hybrid diaper,” which means you keep part of it (the outside cover, which Velcros or snaps) and flush or compost the rest (the inside). A good example of this setup is gDiapers (www.gdiapers.com), and it’s received Cradle-to-Cradle certification, a remarkable achievement for a consumer product. (See www.mbdc.com for information about this certification and why you should be impressed and looking for it.) The green side: Nothing’s filling a landfill; poop goes where poop should go; there is no plastic used; and diapers that are only wet can be composted, breaking down in 50 to 150 days. The downside: The inside is still a single-use product requiring tree-farm wood fiber and sodium polyacrylate crystals and all the energy, water, and other resources that go into a new product and that create pollutants as part of manufacture; and the wraps will take decades, and perhaps hundreds of years, to decompose after reuse is finished.

All things considered, if one were to choose the disposable route, the hybrid diaper offers almost all the same convenience and many more ecological benefits than the typical disposable. But is the hybrid better than cloth? Overall, I would say it’s a wash.

Scott Wolf

Babies and the World They Live In

By Scott Wolf

This summer, the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds in Chico will host its first Green Baby Expo (www.greenbabyexpo.com) 10am-5pm on June 21. This event will focus on planet-friendly, nontoxic, sustainable ways to raise our children, which is no small feat. I have a 2.5-year-old and a one-year-old and am well acquainted with how challenging this can be. Let’s focus on some of the ways we can make their very first out-in-the-world experiences healthy and happy ones.

Breastfeed. Breast milk is uncategorically the best way to go for feeding little ones, despite some fairly high-profile news articles documenting concentrations of PCBs and other nasty chemicals in breast milk. For reasons not yet fully understood, and despite transmitting some of these chemicals, breast milk has an amazing ability to protect children from a host of infections, to reduce rates of cancer and diabetes later in life, and to raise a child’s IQ, just to name a few benefits. The good far outweighs the bad. For a good discussion of this (and many other things mentioned in this article), see Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood by Dr. Sandra Steingraber.

Avoid plastic bottles and cups as a general rule. Certain kinds of plastics can leach bisphenol-A and phthalates into fluids. These chemicals create havoc in the body’s hormonal system, and developing children are particularly vulnerable. If you’d really like to get into the science of it, check out www.ourstolenfuture.org. Instead of plastic, buy glass bottles (easily found online but difficult to find locally in my experience). Or if you have to use plastic at times, as we did when a day care’s policy prohibited glass, see www.thesoftlanding.com/shop.html, which has products that have all been confirmed to be bisphenol-A, phthalate, and PVC free (again, not readily found locally). A great alternative for sippy cups and adult water bottles is the Klean Kanteen, a stainless steel bottle and Chico product (www.kleankanteen.com).

Think used. Not a lot of us could afford all the “brand-news” even if we wanted to: a brand-new diaper-changing table, a brand-new crib, a brand-new dresser, and so on. In this case, that’s a good thing. All of those new products, unless they are solid wood, tend to contain plywood and/or particle board, both of which give off (or “outgas”) formaldehyde, a carcinogen. Fortunately, as time goes by, the emissions from these products gradually decline, making them safer to be around. The same goes for a mattress. Many of us cannot afford an organic cotton, wool, or natural latex mattress, so a used one may be the best option. Much of the outgassing will have happened in the past, though it’s still wise to put a cover over the mattress to minimize exposure to dust mites. The situation is similar for clothing. Cotton is one of the most pesticide-doused plants on the planet, and those toxins end up in cotton clothing. Happily, used clothing, having been washed a number of times, is very unlikely to contain these residues anymore. Go forth and shamelessly solicit hand-me-downs from whomever you can! (One caveat: Do not use furniture with any broken parts or a crib made before 1990, when the Consumer Product Safety Commission set new safety standards.)

If you must paint, paint wisely. Almost all paints contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are carcinogenic and/or neurotoxic. But not all. Major manufacturers, such as Kelly-Moore and Frazee Paint, have jumped on the environmental bandwagon and now have low- or no-VOC offerings. Smaller companies that have strong commitments to developing and offering these paints include Bioshield (www.bioshieldpaint.com), which can be found in Grass Valley at Sons Development and Green Building Supply, 563 Idaho Maryland Rd., 273-7875; Yolo Colorhouse (www.yolocolorhouse.com); Kelly-Moore at 1221 Mangrove Ave. in Chico; and AFM Safecoat (www.afmsafecoat.com), with the closest location being at Green Sacramento (www.greensacramento.com).

Do not install new carpet. Almost all new carpets outgas quite a lot and for quite a while. One option: Stick with your existing flooring, complementing it with area rugs (preferably made of natural materials and prewashed), if suitable. Other options: tile, linoleum (NOT vinyl), cork, bamboo with low- or no-formaldehyde glues, or hardwood from sustainably managed forests.

Finally, I’ll mention one fantastic resource: Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet Guide to Natural Baby Care by Mindy Pennybacker and Aisha Ikramuddin, though a bit dated, is an outstanding book for looking into all of these issues and many more. Check it out.

Hope to see you at the Green Baby Expo! May you and your children be healthy all of your days.

Green Toys for My Family, Please!

By Lorene Foster

My dad recently came to visit our family from out of state. On the way here he stopped by the store and picked up a toy for my five-year-old son, a large orange plastic tractor-trailer truck carrying a crane on the back. My son was so excited to play with it. Within the hour pieces were falling off. Within the week the toy was totally broken and thrown away. A thoughtful gift that my dad had bought was gone, unrepairable and useless trash.

I was talking later with someone who shared how she had taken boxes of broken toys out of her son’s room to the dump, and her son never noticed. These cheap toys were so quickly broken and disposed of he didn’t care a bit. This got me thinking about the importance of buying quality, lasting products.

I think that in this time of everything’s being disposable, many of us have been careful about recycling our bottles, cans, and newspapers, but we have forgotten about all the other unnecessary “disposable products” that we buy. I am a huge bargain shopper. I am always searching for the best deals and the lowest prices, but I am slowly learning that some good deals are not the best deals in the long run. If my dad had spent a little more up front and bought a wooden truck set, or something of better and lasting quality, my son would still have something to play with, and when he was done we could pass it on to someone else. I notice when I am out at a local thrift store many vintage products that are still in good usable condition because they were well made and made to last; many of my kitchen bowls and containers were made in the 1950s and 1960s.

Many of the things I buy now are handmade and locally made. You can shop at local craft fairs, farmer’s markets, and expos. Look through the local paper and keep your eye open for ads this summer. For example, the large Green Baby Expo is coming to the Chico Fairgrounds on Saturday, June 21. Not only will you be supporting your local businesses and craftsmen, but you will be spending your money on something that will last, keeping it out of the landfill and helping to live in a more Earth-friendly way. This mind-set has taken a little bit to get used to, and maybe I don’t have as much stuff, but I enjoy having the things I do have and I know they will last.

A great added bonus is that most handmade products are much more beautiful than mass-produced things. I have read about the Mongolian people and the homes they live in. I am sure that living conditions are similar to theirs in many areas of the world, but these people live in small yurts and have very few possessions, but what they have is really beautiful. They have an intricately carved and painted door, and if they have a table and chair it is the same, ornately made with love and care. I still have a long way to go, but I am really trying to think and ask myself a couple of questions when making a purchase. Is this going to last? Do I love it? With my family I have applied this to buying cloth diapers, baby carriers, plates, cups, furniture, toys, utensils, cars, shoes, and more. I have a doll bed that my grandfather made for me when I was a child and a quilt that my great-grandmother made. I look forward to giving these things to my children, and I hope they pass them on to their children someday. I try to think of these things and the happiness they bring when I go shopping now.

Lorene Foster is the owner of Frog Mama Baby Carriers; the article was submitted by Cyndi Pereira, 530-828-9288, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. www.greenbabyexpo.com

After watching Dr. Bruce Lipton's Conscious Parenting video we knew we needed to make this information available. The issue of nature or nurture is important to understand in order to bring about change in our world. As long as we hold onto the nature/deterministic point of view we are saying our destiny is predetermined by our past, not to mention it keeps us in survival mode and competition. Nurture, on the other hand, implies that our survival depends on cooperation with ourselves and our environment.

LG: What do you mean by conscious parenting? You say, "How we parent our children is how our children will parent their children,, so how do we grab hold and get away from those old belief systems?

BL: Before discussing conscious parenting, I would like to clarify an important point regarding the two different stories that describe how life works. One understanding is expressed in the dialogue among leading-edge research biologists, and the other notion is the one held by the public. The difference between the two points of view is very profound. The average individual has been programmed with the idea that genes (DNA) represent some kind of self-actualizing molecule that controls biology, for example people talk about a gene turning itself on or off, or that a gene causes cancer. This is a simplification based upon the concept of genetic determinism , the belief that our biological and behavioral traits are programmed in our genes. This idea encourages the attitude that we have no control over our lives and that we are merely "victims" of heredity.