Cloth Diapers Essay

Even though cloth diapers are known to be more environmentally friendly and cost less, neither cloth nor disposable diapers are better than the other, since each type of diaper has their own sets of pros and cons. Many parents feel pressured to cloth diaper or feel guilty for using disposables. I set out to find out which type of diaper is truly the superior diaper. I didn’t fathom how the many determinants there were in figuring this tough dilemma out. Some things that are taken into consideration are cost, environmental factors, what is best for baby, and the gross factor. Amy Allen Clark, from Diapering 101 tells, “A breakdown of the cost of disposables cost $2,862.72 over a three year period.” This should be considered an approximate

Trent Hamm from The Simple Dollar “estimates that detergents cost $51 per year and utilities (water and electricity cost $173.55 per year.” I don’t necessarily agree with the cost of the detergent either. Once again, I use coupons, so I don’t spend more than $3 on a bottle of detergent and it gets me through about a month, and I wash all the laundry in the house, not just the diapers. I would estimate that the actual cost of detergent for solely cloth diapers is $12 per year. The water and electric is probably fairly accurate, because that total is combined total of the utilities, and I know electric and water overall cost

Parents can get excellent used condition cloth diapers for ½ of the price of new diapers. This is what I used to accumulate most of my stash. There are local Facebook groups for buying, selling, trading, and swapping. There are also Facebook cloth diaper swap groups that reach out across the country with 20,000 or more members. There are groups for specific brands of buying, selling, and trading cloth diapers. Then there are groups just for the love of cloth diapering, so parents can share triumphs and tribulations in cloth diapering. There are also work at home mom’s that have made a business out of making and selling cloth diapers. This is where style, personalization, and the charming amusing part of cloth diapering comes into