15 | April | 2011 | no waste wednesdays

Archive | 6:38 am

Baby Care

This week No Waste Wednesdays is glad to welcome back our friend Sarah-Jane to share a few helpful hints she’s discovered with diapers and baby wipes for her brand new baby girl!

In the words of Jane:

I have found that in my experience, “going green” really means knowing the difference between an accepted practice, and what is an environmentally better practice — without getting scammed. As a new mother, I have found that this is an extremely tough thing to accomplish. However, I would like to share a couple practices that I have found to be both financially and environmentally worth the effort.

It is not uncommon to hear of mothers now using cloth diapers. When I told my older relatives that this was what I was going to do for my yet unborn baby, they all tried their hardest to talk me out of it. Mainly because they had to use cloth diapers that were homemade and difficult to keep clean. Fortunately, now we have the luxury of buying incredibly good quality cloth diapers that actually clean quite easily (tip: put diapers out in the sun to bleach them, works like a charm).

I chose to use Bum Genius diapers because it has snaps that allow you to change the size of the diaper as your baby grows.

My husband and I figured it would take about 6 months before it started benefited us financially, but we now have all of our diapers for all our children. Many argue that the water used to wash all these cloth diapers is just as bad as filling up the landfills with them. However, according to two very eco friendly advocates Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry from Method out of San Francisco , it takes an estimated 80,000 pounds of plastic and over 200,000 trees every year to make disposable diapers, and the amount of water used in a week to clean an average number of cloth diapers is about the same as flushing your conventional toilets 4 or 5 times a day—this does not even include the amount of energy, plastics, and trees it takes to ship and deliver them.
Each person has to decide what is best for their situation, but if you can make the transition to cloth diapers – the environment, and your pocket books, will thank you.

Lastly, adding to the many cloth diapers piling up in the landfills are the disposable wipes. If possible try and find biodegradable wipes and compost them, better yet, use reusable wipes – especially if you want to avoid the unknown ingredients they are putting in these disposable wipes.
I went to my mom’s sewing room, found a bunch of scrap cloth too small to use, surged around the edges, and before long had 100 reusable wipes for the cost of $0.

This hits the reduce, reuse, and recycle goal! I simply toss them in with the diapers I already have to wash, and that’s it. There are many ways to use these wipes, some prefer to fold them up and store them in a solution in a wipes warmer, but those wipes then need to be used up within a couple days, and it also means purchasing a quality wipes warmer.
I have found that using a squirt bottle with a homemade solution (boiled or distiller water, an oil of preference like mineral oil, olive oil, calendula oil, etc, and tea tree oil for an antibacterial component) and squirting the cloths immediately prior to use is just as effective, and I keep the dry wipes folded in a container ready to go.