Earth Day 2009: You, too, can do this

Happy Earth Day everyone! It seems like everyone in bloggerville has a favorite holiday where they do something fun on their blog. So I claim Earth Day.

Last year, I wrote how every year we try to do something better for the environment. One year we stopped using papertowels. This coming year we are investing in a CSA so our produce will come from a local, organic farm. The goal is to make our change a habit, so we continue to live more sustainable existence.

It occurred to me that I never wrote much about our 2008-09 Earth Day resolution: to use cloth diapers.

To be honest, I was afraid I would do the first load of poopy diapers and fail miserably at keeping the resolution.

And then we found the holy grail of cloth diapering your kid: the bumGenius 3.0.

Of all the products and brands in Missy’s life (and there are a lot), one of my hands down favorites is her bumGenius 3.0 cloth diapers.

The bumGenius is truly genius. It makes cloth diapering a cinch. Show a BG to your mom and watch a wave of jealousy roll across her face. You can practically see the thought-balloon over her head: why didn’t they have these when I had my kids?

I joke about being a hippie. I have a hippie streak in me that runs a mile deep. But you do not have to even be marginally hippie to cloth diaper your kid. Especially not if you use BG diapies.

My goal is not to pontificate. By gosh, if you have a diaper brand or system that works for you, by all means, keep at it. Life is complicated enough. But if you are reading this and have even an inkling that you’d like to try cloth diapering, then consider the BGs.

You can visit the BG website to check out all the product attributes, so I won’t bore you with details. The things I really love about them include:

(1) We are not clogging up a landfill with diapers.
(2) There are no chemicals near my daughter’s body (I don’t actually know what is in the diaper lining of disposables that becomes a gel-like substance when babies pee on it. That’s because manufacturers don’t have to list the contents. But I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if it is non-chemical).
(3) BGs are super easy to clean. You literally toss them in your washer. 2 cycles of wash and they come out white as snow. I shake out the solid poop in the toilet, but Missy was almost 8 months old before I had to start doing this. As a side note, before I had a kid, I super-skeeved out on all the poop stuff. With your own baby, however, it is kind of like scooping your own dog’s poop. It doesn’t bum you out too much.
(4) There is very little smell from the diaper pail because we "do the diapies" (as we call our diapie washing exploits) every other day. Which sounds like a lot, but the practice has become rote.

Doing the diapies adds approximately 6 loads to laundry duty per week because you wash the BGs once on cold and then again on hot. Trust me. 4-6 additional loads of laundry in the scope of how much your laundry will increase is nothin’.

Some may point out that it takes more energy to wash diapers over and over as opposed to simply throwing away disposables but that argument fails to point out how much energy it takes to produce & ship three years worth of disposable diapers per kid. Our 20 BGs were made once. And shipped once. Because they adjust to sizes from 8-35 lbs., we’ll use these until Missy is potty trained. Or if we have another kid. Or we’ll re-sell them. The going rate for used BG 3.0s in Portland is 50% of what we paid for them.

We started out using a diaper service with our own set of diaper wraps. And this was a super way to get on the cloth diaper train. But then the service raised its rates and Missy outgrew the wraps, which cost nearly as much as each BG. All of a sudden being a hippie wasn’t so cost-effective. You can be sure Cowboy did the math.

The BGs have only 2 drawbacks. First, they are spendy. We invested $350 in our set of 20 diapies but we consider it a capital investment. Depreciated over the cost of 2-3 years (not to mention kid #2 should we be that lucky), it is a pittance of what disposables would run.

Another side note, a trendy thing in Portland is to hold a baby shower where every guest brings a small gift + one BG diaper to help the parents-to-be complete their diaper stash.

Second, most cute baby pants, especially constructed ones such as jeans or corduroys, do not work well with cloth diapers in general because the rise on the pants are too short to fit over the baby’s bubble butt. So we do the cute one-piece rompers instead. A small sacrifice in my book.

Anyway, I hope that this post convinced at least one person to try cloth diapering. There is so much information and a plethora of products out there that it is daunting to figure out. I did a lot of groundwork to arrive at the BGs as a solution. Just thought I’d pass on the good word.

What have you done this year to minimize your impact on the environment? Please post your cool ideas in my comments section. I'd love to hear what everyone is up to.

Or you can just call me a flippin' hippie. It will make me laugh.