Taking a brief break from writing about breastfeeding to write about...poop.
I started cloth diapering with my son in 2003. We were living in California and used a diaper service. Once he began sleeping long stretches at night we used disposables because the cloth just didn't cut it (we tried doubling up, but he could barely fit into pajamas that way!). When we moved to Massachusetts he was a toddler and we began washing our own.
When our daughter arrived in 2010 we got out the cloth diapers again. Since my son was born there had been a lot of changes in diaper covers (notably, they got a lot more cute and adjustable), and I purchased some more. I washed them at home in our front-loading washer. (I did consider trying Elimination Communication, but ultimately decided it wasn't for us.)
But last winter I decided that I'd had enough of this, and we signed up for a diaper service. There again, there have been some big improvements. Our current service uses hemp diapers made in the U.S., washes them using environmentally-friendly methods, and uses the same service we use to pick up our garbage - a bicycle delivery service. Yes, even through the snowy New England winter, our diapers are picked up by hearty folks on bikes.
So the only thing that didn't feel quite right was using disposable diapers at night. We used the greener-ones, but it bothered me to know that, since disposables take hundreds of years to decompose, the first diaper we ever used - and in fact the first modern disposable diaper ever used period - is still sitting somewhere, not yet decomposed.
Then this spring, my diaper service started offering something I'd never heard of: a diaper composting service.
Our service sells us a plastic-free disposable diaper, and picks them up with our cloth diapers each week. Then they send the disposables to a professional composting service, where they're turned into safe, rich compost for gardening in three months! If you're wondering how this works, check out this post I coordinated on the Dandelion blog.
So, this is about as green as I can get our diapering. But I'm really interested to see what options are coming down the line!
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