Diapers: Disposable vs. Cloth

Diapering is a big business. There’s a reason parents complain about putting their babies through diapers – it’s costly. The price really adds up when you consider how often a baby should be changed each day: Newborns are changed at least ten to twelve times, and infants and toddlers should be changed six to ten times.

Since diapers are a vital part of early parenting, two camps have formed: Disposable diaper lovers and cloth diaper lovers. In researching and using disposable and cloth diapers, I found many advantages and disadvantages to both. But there is no conclusive evidence that one kind is healthier than the other. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency and American Academy of Pediatrics haven’t taken a position on the diaper debate.

Disposable diaper lovers complain that cloth diapers waste too much water in the washing process, and electricity, if they’re dried in a dryer. Also, if parents don’t sanitize the diapers properly, diaper rash could be problematic.

Cloth diaper advocates have an arsenal of attacks against disposable diapers. Babies use between 5,000 and 8,000 diapers before they’re potty trained 1 when diapered exclusively with disposables, as 80 percent of American children are. That’s a lot of waste coming from each little boy and girl.

Eighty-two thousand tons of plastic and 1.3 million tons of wood pulp – that’s 250,000 trees – are needed for American diapers each year. Since they’re disposable diapers, all that plastic, along with urine and feces, are added to landfills annually – 3.4 million tons of it. 2 While it’s illegal and a violation of the World Health Organization’s standards to dispose of human waste in garbage, how many parents actually flush their child’s bowel movements down a toilet before throwing away a disposable diaper? The untreated human waste accumulates in landfills. If and when the diapers ever decompose, the waste will seep into the groundwater supply.

There’s not much of a chance the diapers will start the decomposition process anytime soon, though. Both air and sun are needed for decomposing, and since garbage is buried in landfills, the trash isn’t exposed to air or sun. Even newer disposable diapers that are marketed as decomposable are, in fact, not – if they’re thrown out in the regular garbage and shipped off to a landfill. 3

Even with the staggering evidence of disposable diapers’ environmental impact – both the production and disposal – diaper companies stand by their products. As an independent voice, Allen Hershkowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that disposable diapers use ten times more resources than cloth diapers and produce fifty times more solid waste, but use half as much energy and two-thirds as much water as cloth diapers. 4 If parents line-dry cloth diapers at home, though, the energy estimate plummets.