Eco-Friendly Diapers

This morning I woke up at 6am with nausea for the first time in weeks.  I had a snack just to have something in my stomach hoping it would settle but it didn’t and I wasn’t able to fall back asleep.  I busied myself by looking up reviews on baby products.

I really want to get eco-friendly diapers.  A newborn baby will go through 8-10 diapers a day and between 5,000 and 6,000 in their baby life span.  That’s a LOT of diapers.  I read that diapers represent 30% of non-biodegradable waste and about 18 billion diapers are thrown away in landfills every year.  I really care about the Earth and want to reduce my impact on the environment and landfills but I’m not really willing to do cloth diapers.  Plus, cloth diapers will create water waste that gets treated and eventually dumped into the ocean.  I am seriously against ocean dumping.*  I read up on all the eco-friendly diaper brands and most reviews complain about leaking.  I found the highest rated eco-friendly diaper is Bambo (made in Denmark).  Baby Gear Lab did an in depth study of various diaper brands and found Bambo to be the best eco option that holds up to Pampers and Huggies.  It’s also the highest rated in consumer reviews.  So I’m definitely going to give them a try.  I figured I should try them along with a regular brand like Pampers the first month to see which works best.  Obviously eco-friendly are a bit more expensive but I’m willing to pay a little more to do my part to help the environment.  I looked up eco-friendly wipes as well and most had bad reviews that they don’t clean well or cause rashes.  I found that Jackson Reece (made in the UK) and Bum Boosa (made in China) have the highest reviews so I’m going to give them a try and see which works best.

I also read that if you’re getting eco-friendly diapers you should get eco-friendly diaper pail bags as well since putting biodegradable diapers inside of a non-biodegradable plastic bag kind of defeats the purpose.  I received a Diaper Genie as a gift so I was going to use that but the brand doesn’t have a biodegradable bag option.  However, people say you can just take any bag and wrap it over the insert of the diaper genie ring, secure it with a rubber band and it’ll work just the same so I’m going to try that.  I only found Diaper Dekor in the way of biodegradable diaper pail bags.  I’ll definitely give them a try along with the Bambo diapers.  If I like them and can’t get the bags to fit the Diaper Genie I’ll just get the Dekor brand diaper pail.

*I don’t necessarily consider myself a tree hugger but I do care about the environment and my impact on it.  Humans create a lot of trash and waste and I think there are a lot of ways to reduce that very easily.  I think everyone should be conscious of the environment and do their part to reduce waste.  I used to recycle but the new apartment building I’ve moved into doesn’t have a recycling pick up service.  I tried contacting the manager of the building to enroll us in it (it’s completely free) but they don’t want to.  For a while we were taking our recyclables to Joe’s parent’s house every time we visited since they have the service but that wasn’t always practical.  We found someone in our building who likes to take the recycling in to collect the five cent rebate on the plastic containers so now I just separate out the glass and plastic and leave them for him to take.  I just can’t in good conscious throw a plastic bottle away knowing it’s going to sit in a landfill forever.

We live near Lake Balboa Park which uses reclaimed water.  After the water is treated, it’s used to water the golf course, plants at the botanical garden nearby and fill a huge lake in a park full of fish and ducks.  It’s a beautiful park and a perfect use for treated water.  I used to go to Hermosa beach with my friends and they have a water treatment plant near there too.  After the water is treated it’s just dumped into the ocean.  The water at Hermosa beach is filled with bacteria and you are not able to swim there.  It’s a lounging sand beach only.  It’s a beautiful beach but it’s sad you can’t swim there.  We dump a lot of trash in the ocean that people aren’t always aware of.  When they are done using metro and subway cars, they just dump them in the ocean instead of recycling the metal to make fences and guard rails.  I love the ocean and ocean life and I don’t think we should be dumping anything in it.  Everything that can be recycled, should be recycled.  Any amount of waste we can reduce, we should reduce.  There’s no reason we shouldn't be automatically sorting our trash into Landfill, Recycling and Compost like San Francisco does.  All water treatment facilities should find better uses to recycle the treated water like Lake Balboa Park does.  Treated wastewater is not potable but it can be used for irrigation and agriculture.  Considering how much of a problem California has with the drought, it actually seems wasteful to dump water that can be used to grow crops.  And honestly, I don’t think I want to live in a world or raise children in a world where the ocean is so polluted you can’t swim in it.