The Environmental Impact of Disposable Diapers

These days, we're all trying to live our lives in a more environmentally friendly manner. Recycle, reuse and conserve are all in our everyday thoughts and actions, and rightly so. Going green is one of the primary reasons we're in the cloth diaper business - it can make a significant positive impact. Let's take a look at how much of a difference reusable cloth diapers can make over disposable diapers.

The Diaper Math:

From birth through the end of diaper years, each child should use approximately 5,300 disposable diapers. It takes between 440 and 880 pounds of fluff pulp and 286 pounds of plastic (including the packaging) per year to supply a single baby with disposable diapers. Wow! That means every child brought up using disposable diapers is putting that much into our landfills.

Here are some interesting stats on diapers in our landfills:

• diapers are the 3rd largest single product in the waste stream behind newspapers and beverage containers
• in regions where paper, glass and other materials are collected for recycling, diapers make up an even larger portion of the total landfill garbage
• in our lifetimes, diapers do not decompose in landfills. That means the human waste trapped inside the diapers can also not decompose properly
• it is estimated that in Canada and the USA, 20,000,000,000 disposable diapers are discarded into landfill sites every single year
• disposable diapers contain traces of Dioxin, an extremely toxic by-product of the paper-bleaching process. It is a carcinogenic chemical, listed by the EPA as the most toxic of all cancer-linked chemicals. This chemical also ends up in our landfills

Some scary eye-opening statistics aren't they? Make the right decision for your family and the environment by seriously considering switching to reusable cloth diapers instead. Want to learn more? Visit our Cloth Diapers 101 webpage for more helpful information.