Throughout 2013, Adding Light will take a look at practical decisions that everyone can take to contribute to making our communities more ecologically and economically resilient. Everything in this Daily Decisions comes from experience or research applied directly by our family or people we know directly.
Your love for a child is never tested so much as when you have to change a diaper...especially a particularly fragrant one. For those with a concern for the environment, that action poses another challenge: what to do with all the waste? We went back and forth on several thoughts and options when our daughter was born. On one hand, we needed something practical, and on the other, we needed something that would reduce the amount of waste going to landfill. We think we found something that balances the two well: flushable insert diapers with washable shells.
My parents used cloth diaper delivery service. As a one-hundred percent re-usable option, they make a ton of sense. The drawbacks: they require a regular delivery/pickup service and they required pins to keep the diaper in place that did not always work. From a practical point of view, these type of diapers leaked regularly, and from an environmental point of view, the transportation energy and emissions added to the environmental consequence. The flushable insert diapers provided the best of the cloth diapers - the reusability - while using the standard waste removal system associated with human waste.
The process is straightforward. The cloth shell has a rubber liner that snaps in and holds the flushable insert. When the diaper needs changing because of urine only, the insert absorbs all the waste, and one simply has to replace the insert with a dry one and flush the insert. The flushing does require a two step process, as a wet insert resembles a panty liner on steroids. The outer skin of the insert is a standard woven paper material, and the fibrous biodegradable material inside resembles lemonade sorbet mixed with cotton balls. When flushing, one has to open the "skin" and dump the innards, then flush the woven material like paper. For solid waste, the process is similar except that the solid waste must get dumped first, and because of the way the diaper fits, a particularly soft solid waste can run over into the rubber lining. We regularly carried spare of both the rubber lining and the cloth shell and rarely had enough trouble in one day to use all our stock. The rubber shells wash easily in a sink and air dry quickly. The cloth shells machine wash and dry easily, and after several washings the eye-and-hook latches remain strong. All-in-all, these diapers provided the best solution.
A couple of words of warning before using them. First, make sure your pipes are strong and large enough. Standard, modern plumbing can handle the flushable inserts. In old houses, however, the pipes may be too small for the woven material. The innards have a consistency much more liquid-like than solid waste, so they pose no problem, but the woven material of the flushable insert is as long as a standard diaper, and when opened to dump the inner material, forms a long piece of fabric that requires a reasonably sized pipe to convey. If you have old pipes, you can continue to flush in inner material, and dispose of the woven skin either in your regular trash, or you can shred it and dispose of it in a compost heap. (According to the manufacturer, you can also dispose of the rest of the diaper...including the waste...in standard compost heaps, but we did not attempt that, so we cannot confirm.) Also, if you are going to attempt this route, I would recommend that you purchase the flushable wipes to go with it. That way you can dispose of everything in the same way and not have to reserve some parts for the landfill and some for the sewer. Lastly, when disposing of the woven material, wait until you have flushed the toilet and the whirlpool has pulled the solid waste in. This reduces the chance that the toilet itself will back up.
We still had to use some standard, disposable diapers for when the grandparents would watch our daughter, or when she would go to a daycare facility that could not handle the style of diaper we chose. All things considered, I estimate that we reduced the landfill waste by about 50% over using disposable diapers for all, and that if we were to use them again for another child, we could possibly get to 75% without much more work.
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