Monday, 30 June 2008

• Cloth-Disposable Hybrid: gDiapers

  by Mama Hippo

  While pregnant and attempting to make all the 1,000,003 decisions involved with having and caring for a baby, I briefly considered trying to go with cloth diapers... but it was very brief.  Honestly, the convenience of disposables (and the fact that we don't have a dryer) won over, especially after reading a few reports that questioned whether cloth diapers are really that much more eco-friendly when you take into account the energy, water, and detergents needed to wash them.  Also, where we live in Switzerland all trash is burned, so while that still adds to carbon emissions at least all these diapers aren't going into a landfill to hang around for 500 years.
  
  I did later hear about a sort of cloth-disposable hybrid diapers called gDiapers. These diapers have a cloth outer covering, and a disposable insert that can be thrown away (but decomposes much faster than regular diapers), or can be flushed down the toilet or even composted (pee diapers only).  This option greatly intrigued me, and so when I was shopping at Central Market with my sisters the other day and saw that the store carried starter packs of these diapers, I figured I'd give them a try.
  
  And so far, so good!  The diapers fit pretty well, though they're amusingly bulky compared to the thin Pampers we normally use.  They are pretty cute on him, though.  He hasn't had a poopy diaper in them yet, I'm curious to see how they'll do with that, especially since we've lately been having more issues with, um, leakage in his disposables. My parents used to have a compost pile in the backyard, but unfortunately not anymore, so I can't compost the inserts but I've been flushing them down the toilet and that seems to be working pretty well.  These do add an extra step or 2 to the diaper-changing process, but it's not really a big deal, and heck if you can flush the poopy diapers as they happen rather than having them sit in a diaper pail in his room for days?  That's kinda nice.
  
  Refill inserts I don't think I'll be able to find in Switzerland, so we'll probably go back to our usual disposables when we return after this trip, but I still feel good about keeping at least a few diapers out of the landfills while we're here, and I may very well go back to using these when we move back to the US with D.

  Anyone else try gDiapers?  Did they work well for your baby?

  • 5:25 PM
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