Green Bum!

It's really hard for me to think of all the things we do to conserve off the top of my head. Probably the biggest thing is cloth diapering so I'll start there. Why are disposable diapers or "sposies" bad? Firstly they have what they call absorbent gelling materials, or AGM, in them. AGM has been linked to increased asthma in children and a lower sperm count among boys. Even some/most(don't know for sure) organic sposies have AGM in them. And even the organic diapers require the same amount of water, energy and fuel to make them as other non-organic sposies. I won't bore you with all the actual statistics, but you can find them HERE but here's some highlights:

• since sposies have been introduced to baby bottoms, diaper rash occurrences have raised by alarming percentages
• those clear beads you find on your baby when changing a sposie is the CHEMICAL sodium polyacrylate
• dioxin is in bleached sposies from the bleaching process which has been shown to cause cancer, birth defects, liver damage, and skin diseases
• it's estimated that 18 billion single-use diapers are thrown in landfills each year
• sposies can take as many as 500 years to decompose, and usually contain raw, untreated sewage.
• to manufacture the sposies, it takes more than 82,000 tons of plastic and 1.3 million tons of wood pulp, or a quarter-million trees, to cover the bottoms of 90 percent of the babies born in the US¹

I'll stop there because I think you get the point. 

I've found that you can also make cloth diapers even more environmentally friendly by keeping in mind that bamboo grows at a very quick pace and requires less pesticides in order to do so, making it an even more renewable resource. It's just an added bonus that its also more absorbent than cotton and just as soft! So when possible I opt for bamboo over cotton. You can also opt for organic cotton to avoid the pesticides. I also opted to use mostly prefolds or fitted diapers with a cover separate that way I can avoid having the synthetic fibers in each diaper. This way I only have 5 covers with the synthetics rather than 30 pocket diapers or all in ones (AIO) with synthetics in each. My favorite bamboo fitted is the little known Pooters one size fitted. I do have a few pocket diapers as well, but hey, I'm not perfect!

My next step to making cloth diapers even more green in our household is the baby wipes. I didn't really think about it when I stocked up when I found a great deal on baby wipes on Amazon.com because Jeremy had said he didn't want to do cloth baby wipes. Well he changed his mind when some friends of ours told him they use cloth wipes. Now I still have about 3 cases of disposable wipes left to go through before I make the switch. I will be doing some research soon, and emailing that friend to see what the best material is. I'll report back more on that later!

Oh and I almost forgot. Studies have shown that cloth diapered babies potty train up to a year earlier than sposie babies!

Special thanks to my baby boy who sat on my lap through the duration of this blogging endeavor very patiently! But now he says its time for a change of scenery! Toodle-loo!

I'm going to leave you with this blissful photo I took when I was line drying(another eco-friendly practice) all my colorful cloth diapers/covers when I was 8 months pregnant!

^{1 http://www.diapernet.org/whycloth.htm}