Real Diaper Week: Day 2

Since Booty Buns Cloth Diapers decided to co-host the Great Cloth Diaper Change 2012, so many cool things have happened! I am so grateful to take part in such an amazing experience & help educate people about cloth diapering.

Real Diaper Week is the week right before the big event {April 21, 2012}. Everyday between April 16 & 21 there will be a new topic to blog about to help get our readers pumped for the record breaking event. If you want to blog during the Real Diaper Week, click here & add your blog to the linky, then pick a topic {or all of them} and start writing!

If you are in Orange County & would like to join us, please email Rose at {rose (at) rosieposiebaby (dot) com} with your name, your baby's name & baby's height. Even if you don't live in Orange County, CA you can still participate! Click here & search for a host near you. Just type in your zip code & look for some where to join in.

Today's Topic is:

 Real Simple Real Diapers Waste Reduction –  Waste Reduction, Environmental benefits, Elimination Communication (diaper-free baby)

Using cloth just makes sense. It doesn't matter if you are using it for financial reasons, health reasons, environmental reasons or ethical reasons - whatever your reasoning, we are all working together to create less waste.

Did you know that on average there are 2,920 diaper changes in the first year of a baby's life {8 changes a day for 365 days}? If you use disposable diapers that means that you are throwing away 2,920 diapers in the first year of life for each of your children. That's 2,920 diapers that nobody is really sure how long it will take to decompose. Some reports guess that it will take 500 years, while others say they really have no way to tell how long it will take because disposable diapers haven't been around for anywhere close to 500 years. If you had a penny for every diaper you changed in the first year of life you could buy a pair of Tiny TOMS!

And did you know that on average over 18 BILLION, yes BILLION, disposable diapers are thrown away in the US each year? If you were to lay each diaper side by side, it would be able to reach the moon & back 9 times with the amount of disposable diapers that are thrown away each year. Think about how much waste would be kept out of the landfills if more people used cloth. According to the Real Diaper Association, disposable diapers are the third largest consumer item to take up space in landfills & make up 50% of the waste of a family who uses disposable diapers. WOW! 

How can using cloth help reduce waste? Well lets look the math:

2,920 diaper changes in the first year of live

That's 2,920 disposable diapers in one year

or

20 cloth diapers in total

Each cloth diaper is worth the equivalent of 146 disposable diaper in the first year alone. Each cloth diaper would be worth 292 disposable diapers after 2 years of use; and, each cloth diaper would be worth 438 disposable diapers after 3 years of use.

That means that 1 disposable diaper does the same job as 2 extra large boxes of diapers! So if you buy 1 cloth diaper @ $25.50 you save your self from having to spend $90 on 2 extra large boxes of disposable diapers. That's a saving of $64.50 times 36 months = $2,322. 

Who would have thunk that you could save money while cutting back on waste & helping the environment? ;) 

 If you chose to use a cloth diaper for even just one diaper change on your child per day, you could make a huge impact. That one cloth diaper alone would keep 1,095 disposable diapers out of landfills. Inside Medford stated that there were a approximately 312,152,800 children under the age of 2 in the world in 2011. Assuming that number was correct, I am going to use it to show one more astounding math problem. It is the most recent number I could find when I searched for how many babies there are under the age of 3, so that's why I'm using it. 

If each of the 312,152,800 babies under the age of 2 used 1 cloth diaper for 1 change a day  it would keep

341,807,316 ,000 disposable diapers out of landfills.

That's over 341 BILLION diapers!!! 341 BILLION disposable diapers that would be kept out land fills while all of those children are in diapers if they all used just 1 cloth diaper for 1 diaper change a day!!!