Environmental Impact

Parents can count on changing between 5,000 and 8,000 diapers per child, and since 95 percent of families use disposables, most of those diapers are one-time use, resource-intensive packages that get sent to municipal landfills at the rate of 3.5 million tons per year. The relative amounts of resources, including water and energy, used in cloth diapers versus disposables have been debated, and some environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club, say it's a wash. But there are still quite a few reasons to avoid conventional disposable diapers on the market.

Environmental Issues

Most disposable diapers are bleached, contributing to the global production of dioxin, a highly toxic byproduct of pulp and paper bleaching, and 250,000 trees are used every year to make disposable diapers for American babies. This virgin pulp goes straight from your baby's bottom into the landfills. On top of that, each year, millions of tons of untreated sewage goes to the landfill along with disposable diapers, an unsanitary practice that raises the potential for groundwater contamination, and fecal material, if it were to escape a landfill's fortifications through leaks or via insects and other pests, is an excellent medium for transmitting parasites, viruses and bacteria.

Baby's Health

Disposable diapers contain polyacrylate crystals, also called "super absorbent polymer" or "SAP," which can absorb up to eight hundred times their weight in water, turning into gel when wet and keeping baby dry and protecting her from diaper rash. But, should the diaper break open, which can happen when the material is wet, the gel could end up on baby's skin and possibly in baby's mouth, leading to skin irritation and gastrointestinal irritation, if ingested. Furthermore, because SAP allows diapers to hold so much liquid while keeping your baby's bottom dry, your child may have a harder time recognizing when she is wet and have a harder time potty training. In contrast, the cloth diaper industry claims that parents can expect a cloth-diapered baby to toilet train a year earlier than babies in disposables.

In addition to SAP, animal studies have linked the emissions from the plastics and fragrances in disposable studies with respiratory problems and symptoms of asthma. And finally, in 2000 the biocide tributyltin was detected in eight brands of disposable diapers. Even though tributyltin can be absorbed through the skin and lead to immune system damage and disrupted hormone function, diapers are not routinely tested for the substance.