by Linze Floyd

Created on: June 02, 2008

Trying to find the right diaper for you and your baby can be a daunting task, especially with so many options on the market. There are generally three kinds of diapers: disposable (bad), cloth (bad), and gDiapers (good).
Disposable diapers, which have been around since the 1950's, offer short-term convenience for the parent, but come with a long future of more than five hundred years in a landfill and an increased risk for diaper rash. You should also consider the increased risk of diaper rash, which stems from allergies to chemicals, lack of air, higher temperatures because the plastics retain body head, and babies being changed less because disposable diapers can absorb fifteen times their weight. When thinking of environmentally friendly, or "green" diapers, disposable diapers can't even come close.

Diapers are full of synthetic plastics and polymers that take hundreds of years to decompose. Disposable diapers just don't make much sense, seeing as your baby will wear one for only a few hours, yet the diaper will live longer than your child's great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren. However, I have heard the argument that, because disposable diapers are mass-produced and the production process is so efficient, there is not a lot of waste in the process of creating these ever-lasting poop holders. But by that logic, you could say that our (ab)use of oil is green because we're using a resource to its fullest efficiency.
Cloth diapers are the traditional alternative to disposable diapers. Seeing as cloth diapers have been around significantly longer than disposable diapers, it can seem as though they are a viable, green option. However, cloth diapers suck resources from the Earth faster than disposable diapers do. To properly clean cloth diapers, massive amounts of water, heat, and energy are used. While you won't contribute to the millions of diapers thrown into landfills every day, you will end up wasting thousands of gallons of water and inevitably burning oil to support the exhaustive laundering process. And while the thought of using cloth diapers can seem tempting to those of us who want a green alternative to disposable diapers, they simply don't cut it.
gDiapers, however, are actually green diapers. Originating from Australia, gDiapers are definitely the greenest diapers out there. They have a cloth exterior, much like a cloth diapers (which come in really cute colors, so you can color-coordinate your baby's diaper with their clothes!) and an insert that you can either compost (the wet ones, anyway), flush down your toilet (like the rest of your family's waste), or toss into the trash. While the millions of disposable diapers in the landfill wear out their welcome, the gDiaper inserts decompose in about one hundred days.
gDiapers are costly (anywhere between $20-100 for set-up, and about $0.30 per diaper, compared to about $0.20 per disposable diaper), but absorbing the true cost of a product is part of what being an environmentalist is all about. Instead of deflecting the cost to some poor third world country, or your neighbor, you should pay for the cost of your actions. More importantly, though, they do not overstay their welcome in your local landfill as disposables, nor do they exhaust many resources during their lifetime as cloth diapers do.
Simply put, gDiapers are the cutest, greenest diaper around.

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