I just explained how I made cloth diapers work for us. And now I'll explain why I'm ditching them.
Cloth diapers aren't bad, but disposables are definitely easier. The parts I dislike the most are:
1) Dealing with solids on cloth diapers when babies get older (there's a big gross factor)
2) Putting the diapers into the wash (yuck!)
3) Taking the time to stuff the inserts into the diapers after they're dry
4) I don't appreciate the cloth diaper aesthetic; they are bulkier to wear so it makes my babies look like pears.
5) The bulky diapers makes my kids grow out of their clothes faster.
6) Disposables do a better job of wicking water away from a baby's skin. Cloth diapers have cotton inserts which obviously are not the best at wicking and their skin just seems wetter when I change them using cloth diapers (result: more diaper rash)
I'm willing to put up with minor inconvenience for a good reason, but when I sat down to calculate my cost savings today from cloth diapers, I was simply appalled.
When I had been thinking about cloth diapers, I had only been thinking about the time cost, not the monetary cost of laundering. It turns out there is a not insignificant monetary cost associated with the laundering process.
Cost of disposables:
I don't use name brand disposables. I've found that the very best diapers you can buy are Pampers, but that Target, Costco and Walmart all have good store brand alternatives. The worst disposables in my opinion are Luvs or Huggies. The cost of disposables in sizes 2 and 3 (which should take us through between 14-18 months) is 14.5 cents a diaper.
The cost of laundering cloth diapers based on our electric rate of $0.08 per kwhr:
8-11 cents a load for detergent
7-11 cents a load for electricity for our well pump to pump the water
25-55 cents for one hot wash and four cold washes
30-40 cents for the dryer electricity
If I average it all out and divide by the average number of diapers in one of my loads (between 8 and 9), the cost for us to wash a cloth diaper is approximately 11.5 cents. This is a whopping savings of 3 cents a diaper from disposables, or 65 cents a week and $34 a year. (If you had to factor in the cost of buying the cloth diapers the equation would become ridiculous, since each reusable diaper costs about $20, though I got my stash on Craigslist for a lot less.)
When the diapers are bigger, the per diaper cost of disposables increases to about 19 cents, and the per diaper savings skyrockets to 8 cents, yielding a savings of $1.67 a week or $87 a year.
I just want to tell you that my time is worth a lot more than that to me.
Of course, this whole post so far is ignoring the environmental trade off between cloth and disposables. With cloth you're not putting the chemicals that are in disposables next to baby's skin. That's great--but not so great if you're giving them diaper rash by keeping them wet.
The big environmental problem with disposables is the space they take up in landfills. Definitely a significant negative. But a thorough life cycle analysis of the issue in the UK has discounted the landfill aspect of disposables, and found that the manufacture of them had bigger environmental impacts. Even so, the study found that given recent reductions in the energy required to make a disposable diaper, the carbon impact (ie energy use) of disposables is actually less than with reusables if you use hot wash water and if you use a dryer (both of which I do). Check out the UK environmental agency's very thorough report on the subject (scroll to the end for their conclusions): http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=WR0705_7589_FRP.pdf
It'd take more than that UK report to convince me that disposables can be better for the environment (depending on how you wash reusables). But it's interesting that the issue is debatable.
Regardless, this is my take on the situation: bye, bye cloth diapers.
Addendum: I think cloth diapers can make sense, if, like my friend Alison said in the comments below, you have big loads of diapers--two kids in diapers at once, and use them 100% of the time, and have a lot of the diapers so that you do loads as infrequently as possible. Big loads, cold water, line drying: that's what makes them work.
