Diaper Decisions

One of many things we had considered about our upcoming baby was whether to use cloth diapers or disposable ones. The disposable seem like they would be easier due to not having to clean them after use, but the cost is higher in the long run and we would have to keep purchasing them forever.

The cloth diapers require cleaning, but we keep and reuse them. The upfront cost would be more but it would only be a one or two time cost. Also, we would always have a diaper if needed. I wouldn't have to run out to the store in the middle of the night if we had run out of the disposables for some reason.

Amanda is all for the cloths. I am a little hesitant but we're going to go with them to start out. If it doesn't work we may switch to disposables but I'm sure I'll learn to love them after a very short while. They have all sorts of neat things nowadays for cloth diapers which make them easier to use.

There are flushable liners to help keep the doody off the diapers and hopefully me. They have wraps what go around the diaper and help keep poo and pee in. There are Snappis that make closing a diaper a breeze! So it should be alright.



One way to help me see it's a better idea is to take a look at the cost of cloth versus disposable diapers. I won't go too in depth with the number crunching because I don't want to bore you. But let's take a quick look.

So with some numbers I got from this site, I have found an approximate number of diaper changes we will have to make.

 So you can see by the chart to the right and up a little that we will need to have approximately 1950-3750 diapers through the first two years. Now let's see how much for both types of diapers.

I am using info from Clothdiaper.com and Walmart.com to get the prices for the following comparison. Clothdiaper has a package deal that includes (so they say) all the diapers we would need to take our baby from birth to 30 lbs, or about 2 years. This package costs, as of today, $224.95. We would need to get Snappis and other unknown as of right now items to complete the package, so I'll just say $300 to get set up on the disposables for two years.

Now at Walmart I found Pampers Baby Dry diapers for sale. They are different prices for different sizes so I used the above linked chart to determine what size and whatnot and made a little chart of my own to determine the cost. What I came up with was that it would cost between approximately $471.10 and $853.20 for the first two years of disposable diapers. I imagine it would be somewhere in the middle in real life. This is a sizeable difference, a $171-553 difference. Not too bad.

The monetary savings is nice, but some would even say the environmental savings is even better. With the cloths you don't have to throw them away and help fill up landfills with human waste and plastic. I don't have any specific info/data on that matter, but you can imagine how much impact 2-4000 diapers would have on the precious Earth. So we would be environmentalists by using these cloth diapers. Maybe there is a tax break or something for it. If there's not there should be. We'll have to start lobbying our Congressman and Senator to get this enacted.

Well, I've got to get going now but I'm sure glad you stopped by and had a look. I'll be back tomorrow with something else interesting to read. See ya later.