fuzzibunz

A dilemma in our household lately as we make our final preparations for baby girl has been to brave the world of cloth diapers or go with the standard disposable.

We have officially decided to give cloth a try.

While I was on the fence Jimmy had a strong opinion favoring the idea of cloth diapers for various reasons. The top concern for him of course is baby. What’s the best for our baby? Concern #2 waving heavily for him was the environmentally impact of disposable diapers. While I consider ourselves environmentally conscious consumers there aren’t many areas of our lives where I’d say we go above and beyond to be environmentally friendly. That being said, here are just a few environmental statistics that really “hit” me:

·  It’s estimated that 27.4 billion disposable diapers are consumed every year in the    US.

·  No one knows how long it takes for a disposable diaper to decompose, but it’s estimated to be about 250-500 years!

·  Disposable diapers are the 3^rd largest single consumer item in landfills. In a house with a child in diapers, disposables make up 50% of household waste.

·  A family who chooses cloth diapers prevents one ton of solid waste from entering the waste stream.

I actually ordered 2 different brands of cloth diapers – BumGenius and FuzziBunz because I’m a visual person and needed to see for myself how these things would work and what exactly I would have to do differently with this process opposed to the standard change and toss of the disposables. Well of course my engineering minded husband had the things taken apart in no time and for various reasons we are choosing to order the FuzziBunz brand. They seemed to be softer, more durable, more versatile in terms of sizing (we are going with the one size option – meaning our babe will wear the same ones from newborn to potty training), and easier to take apart for washing. They also offer these handy laundry bags that allow you to load the diapers in the top, and then unzip the bottom over the washer causing the diapers and inserts to go directly into the washer, toss the bag in with the diapers and wash them all together – less messy! They (as in most cloth companies, not just FuzziBuns) also offer biodegradable, flushable inserts that you can put directly into the diaper as well – avoiding the need to shake or scrap out the diaper when baby performs #2. I must admit, that was the #1 thing I was wanting to avoid in this whole process and they now offer a way around it so I had no excuseJ

Of course there are some cost benefits to using cloth vs disposable – although with some bulk buying options out there this is debatable. But, this wasn’t a big part of our decision making it’s always nice to save some bucks, right?!

Regardless of the statistics and convenience for me the determining factor was truly my husband’s desire to give cloth a try. I saw so many conveniences in disposables but discovered that this was something that was important to Jimmy. Cloth diapers have come so far from where they used to be. My mom’s first reaction to me telling her we were going to try cloth was “have fun with that!” but when you look at the way they have evolved today’s cloth diapers are quite a bit different from the days of our childhood, don’t you think? No more folding and pin snaps, shaking out the solids, soaking them in bleach buckets, etc!

So that’s been the big dilemma in our household the last month or so and is now solved – our babe’s stash of FuzziBunz cloth diapers are on orderJ