The Great Diaper Debate
Many parents who want to lessen the environmental impact of raising a baby are choosing cloth over disposable diapers. Problem is, they may not always be making the greener choice.
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For Quenby and Jason Hughes of Arlington, the decision to use cloth instead of paper diapers for their son, Reilly, was an easy one. Quenby herself was cloth-diapered as a baby, and she preferred putting cotton rather than plastic and paper against her child's skin. Wanting to do the right thing for the environment was also a major factor. The couple had been making an effort to avoid plastics even before they started reading up in green parenting books and blogs on the impact of disposable diapers. They store their leftover food in the fridge in glass containers instead of plastic ones and use cloth napkins instead of paper around the house. These days, they're also opting for glass baby bottles and avoiding plastic toys. "We're trying to be as environmentally friendly as possible raising a kid," says Quenby.
In a quest to find greener alternatives, many parents are taking a fresh look at cloth diapers. Donna Grybko, who owns and runs the diaper service Changing Habits in Deerfield, is quick to agree that her diapers are the environmentally superior option. Her washers and dryers are set to use less heat and less water than those found in most homes, says Grybko. She also plans her delivery routes - one of which winds through Natick, South Deerfield, Shutesbury, Bolton, Maynard, Acton, Newton, Jamaica Plain, and Roslindale in a single 280-mile-long trip - to be as fuel-efficient as possible.
On a recent Thursday, Grybko stopped in Arlington to meet the Hugheses for the first time. The new parents met her at the door barefoot, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, and Grybko talked nonstop as she presented them with 70 diapers, four diaper covers, and a pail for the dirties. Pulling out a plastic doll from her bag, she demonstrated different diapering techniques, including a fold called the "bikini twist," before the couple tried a diaper out on Reilly, then just 5 days old. They found Grybko's diapers a good fit, both for their son and their lifestyle.
I was curious about cloth diapers myself and would have seriously considered using them on my baby, who is due next month, if my partner weren't so dead set again them. It wasn't their environmental impact he was skeptical about; it was the hassle he associated with them - having to set aside space in our apartment for a diaper pail and coordinating a collection time with a diaper service. (When I pointed out that with disposables, we'd be keeping the used ones in garbage bags inside our home in between trash collections, he still wasn't convinced.) Grybko had told me that cloth-diapering rarely works out when both parents don't agree it's the best option, so in the end, I dropped it.
FOR PARENTS, WHO WILL CHANGE A baby's diaper between 5,000 and 7,000 times in the first two years of his or her life, the decision about green diaper options ought to be easier. "What everybody wants is a wonderful, simple, easy conclusion," says Bruce Nordman, a researcher with the Energy Analysis Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "But there's no easy answer."
While disposables produce more trash - up to 70 times more than cloth, according to a report from the University of Minnesota - reusable diapers consume significant amounts of energy being washed and dried repeatedly. Diaper services like Grybko's use additional energy in the form of fuel as they shuttle diapers to and from homes. The most recent independent research, released in 2005 by Britain's Environment Agency, found no difference between the overall environmental impact of disposable diapers, home-laundered cloth, and commercially laundered cloth diapers. Other studies conducted over the past 20 years have drawn conflicting conclusions, depending on which phase of a diaper's life cycle - the production, use, or disposal - the study focused on. And supposedly greener disposable diapers - brands like Seventh Generation and TenderCare, which tout themselves as alternatives to giants Huggies and Pampers - complicate things further.
These choices didn't even exist until the early 1960s, when single-use diapers first appeared on the market - and there wasn't much debate at the time. Within 10 years, only 10 percent of parents were still using cloth. Disposables hit a brief rough patch in the 1990s when fear spread about the kinds of chemicals going into them, and it was in 1990 that Grybko, then working as a preschool teacher, and her sister, Cindy, founded Changing Habits in their father's basement in South Deerfield. In 1995, Cindy left the company to have a baby, and Donna took over. Last year, Changing Habits grossed $130,000 and had about 160 clients. And while 95 percent of parents in the United States now choose disposables, fueling an industry worth over $5 billion, Grybko says that she has no trouble drumming up new clients when old ones grow out of her service.
Amanda Dicob, a 33-year-old Harvard University employee who is expecting her first child this fall, began considering cloth diapers while browsing message boards on parenting websites. She found that many posts painted reusables as the green alternative (one claimed each disposable diaper was equal to one cup of petroleum). When she came across an article that posed the question, "If cotton is so bad for the environment, why aren't we all wearing plastic clothes?" it struck a chord.
Dicob was also pulled toward cloth when she weighed the costs. She used the website diaperdecisions.com to calculate how much she was likely to spend in the first 21/2 years of her expected daughter's life, from birth to potty training. Assuming she buys 36 cloth diapers and six diaper covers, which she'll have to wash at home three times a week, the site calculates she will spend between $381 and $1,677, depending on the brand of cloth diaper she uses. Dicob estimates her costs at around $720, including laundry expenditures such as extra water and electricity. The bill for disposables for the same period would be $2,577.35, about 31/2 times more expensive. (If she used Grybko's service, she'd spend about $2,545.) Dicob calculates that after two children, she will have saved about $4,000, a factor she used to help persuade her husband that cloth was the right choice.
RIP OPEN A DISPOSABLE DIAPER AND YOU'LL SEE THE DOWNY paper-pulp filling inside. To make the pulp, trees are grown on plantations, requiring nutrients, pesticides, water, and mechanical energy. The next step, converting wood into pulp, leaves behind toxic byproducts called chlorinated hydrocarbons, which can contaminate lakes and streams near factories. (Chlorine-free brands, like Seventh Generation and TenderCare, avoid this specific kind of pollution.) Also added to the diapers are plastics in the form of adhesives, film, and synthetic rubber strands for fit and leakproofing - man-made materials that are mostly petroleum-derived and not renewable. Most companies also use chemical pigments to dye the inner and outer cover materials white. (Seventh Generation dyes its diapers tan to help distinguish the brand.) Without these pigments, the diapers would be colorless, about the shade of a plastic milk jug.
By far the most visible environmental impact of disposables is all the garbage they create, between 0.5 and 1.8 percent of volume of landfill waste nationwide, according to a Michigan State University study. (Think 1.8 percent more garbage trucks on the road, and 1.8 percent more fuel consumed and pollution generated by those trucks.) Claims by some makers that their diapers are made from biodegradable materials can be confusing. Much household trash ends up in landfills, where, by the nature of their design, very little biodegrades. "People believe that Whole Foods equals good," says Grybko, referring to some of the disposable diapers carried by
But reusable diapers do not necessarily equal good, either. Like the farming of trees, growing cotton requires nutrients, pesticides, water, and mechanical energy, and cotton farming may increase soil erosion. It also matters where the cotton is grown. Some of Grybko's diapers, for example, are made in China and shipped to the United States, adding to their carbon footprint. Compare that with BumGenius organic cloth diapers, made from cotton grown in the United States with no pesticides or fertilizers, and making generalizations about environmental impact becomes difficult.
Calculating the effect of their laundering is equally complex. Washing machines and dryers, whether used at home or by a commercial laundry service, vary widely in their efficiency, warns Nordman. (He used a combination of cloth and disposable diapers on his first child; with his second, just disposables.) A fair assessment of any cloth diapering system depends on whether gas, electric, or solar energy is used to heat water, the washing-machine load size, amounts and types of detergents and bleaches used, and how many gallons of water are expended per cycle. Britain's Environment Agency calculated that users of home-laundered cloth diapers can reduce their environmental impact by making adjustments like employing a clothesline instead of a dryer. "The choice between cloth and disposable diapers is not in the products," says Nordman. "It's in the people."
Still, many parents who want to do what's best for the environment aren't getting the best information. While many blogs, books, and online forums extol the benefits of cloth diapers, helping parents feel good about choosing what they see as the greener option, the research shows surprisingly little evidence supporting one over the other.
Which means it is up to parents to weigh the costs - in time, money, energy, and pollution - and decide whether cloth or paper diapers are right for their baby. For some, it's an equation with ever-changing variables. For others, it's a matter of faith. "You'll never convince me that something you reuse is not better for the environment than something you throw out," says Tim Aagard, who owns the California-based Tiny Tots Diaper Service and says he lives by the motto reduce, reuse, and recycle. His advice for parents examining their choices may be deceptively easy: "Keep it simple."
Silvia Spring is a writer in Boston's South End. Send comments to magazine@ globe.com.
