Helping the environment one baby at a time
The Maternal Wellness Center is now proud to offer cloth diapers to our customers. Cloth diapers are a great way to help save the environment, lower your family's monthly diaper cost and help protect your baby soft skin.
This website should help answer many of your questions about cloth diapering and provide you with information to get you started. Please contact Jennifer Kinka, our Cloth Diapering Coordinator, for any questions or to place an order.
Why Use Cloth Diapers?
Environmental Reasons:
- One Baby will need approx. 6,000 disposable diapers for a 21/2 year diapering period
- To acquire the wood pulp for disposable diapers, one billion trees world-wide are cut down per year
- Over 300 pounds of wood, 50 pound of petroleum feedstocks and 20 pounds of chlorine are used to produce disposable diapers for one baby EACH YEAR
- Disposable diapers make up the 3rd largest single consumer item in our waste system-following newspapers and beverage containers. (Its the largest non-recyclable item)
- It takes 500 years for one disposable diaper to decompose
- It is illegal in most states to dump human waste in landfills. That law is simply not enforced when it comes to diapers.
Economic Reasons:
- Using disposables during one child's diapering years will cost between $1,500 and $2,100.
- The Recommended number of cloth diapers is 36 with 9 covers (if the chosen diapers needs covers). At a cost of between $3.00 and $18.00 per diaper, the cost of cloth diapers for one child will range from $150-$650.
- Once a set of cloth diapers is purchased, they can be used for multiple children
- Upon finishing with cloth diapers, many people choose to resell them, recovering some of the investment.
Health Benefits:
- Most disposable diapers contain dioxin and sodium polyacrylate. Dioxin, a by-product of the paper-bleaching process used in disposable diapers, is a carcinogenic chemical, listed by the Environmental Protection Agency as one of the most toxic of all cancer-linked chemicals.¹ Sodium polyacrylate is a common material found in disposable diapers. This super-absorbent polymer becomes a gel-like substance when wet and was banned from tampons in 1985 due to links to toxic shock syndrome.¹
- As the use of disposable diapers increased, the incidence of diaper rash also increased. In 1955, 100% of babies born in America wore cotton diapers and only 7% of them experienced diaper rash. However, in 1998, with 90% of American babies in disposable diapers, the occurrence of diaper rash had increased to 78%.