How do you calculate the cost of cloth diapers?

[DAQ]

I've been working from home now since March of 2020. While disposables are awesome and I much prefer them I really am starting to consider the environmental cost as well as financial cost. With the shortage of shipping containers I only see disposable diaper costs going up up up. That being said if you are trying to compare the costs the math is fuzzy without experience. So just been spitballing some questions that have come up while thinking about it.

 

Do you have an assumed lifespan of the cloth diapers? Are there steps you can take to make them last longer?

I have had bad experiences with plastic pants longevity. Is there a way to make them last longer? Is there a way once they have gotten stiff to revitalize them?

What does washing them cost?

Is it actually cheaper than disposables?

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

[Stroller]

13 hours ago, DAQ said:

Do you have an assumed lifespan of the cloth diapers? Are there steps you can take to make them last longer?

I have had bad experiences with plastic pants longevity. Is there a way to make them last longer? Is there a way once they have gotten stiff to revitalize them?

What does washing them cost?

Is it actually cheaper than disposables?

Hi DAQ.  The lifespan of mine is a matter of years, not months.  I wear them full-time & I've got about enough to last a week or so (plus some old ones I haven't used for a long time).  Of course I actually wash them more often than that.  Cloth squares need no maintenance (my squares are terry cotton, my soakers are mainly cotton).  Nappies with velcro fastening will need the velcro replacing periodically - I replace mine about once a year.

Polyurethane pants last a lot longer than PVC, and aren't affected by oils or vaseline. They don't get stiff.  I wash mine by hand daily.  These are pure polyurethane, not PUL.

I've never worked out the cost of washing, but I run a 60 degree wash every two days, followed by a couple of hours in the dryer.

I'm pretty sure it's a lot cheaper than disposables, but I wear washables mainly for environmental reasons, so I don't worry about it too much.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

I have had panties where the material outlived the elastics. Those were from Comco. 6 and 7 mil are quite durable, Also Babykins rubber last quite a long time. The more of anything you get, the less wear and tear you put o each individkual one. I have had the ones I got from LL Medico for 8 years. Now I have a snap-on panty fro each diaper. I follow the recommendations that were made a few times at DPF. a rubber panty over plastic

I tend to think that 20+ USD per unit for prefolds is over the top but somep places sell flats fro much less each by the dozen

The more you wash per load, the cheaper each is to care for since you you do not use 5 times more water and cleaner to wash 5 diapers than you do 1. This all presumes you have access to a washig machine. Is not this the 21st ecntury?

For a beginner,, depending on your usage, If you are going to wear every night, or or then I suggest a dozen diapers and 4 rubber panties for starters

For more information on panties, see RUBBER PANTIES 'R' US, the access is the last small icon on my siggy. That is the sum total of 7+ decades of being around them in one form or other and my "blankie" was a piede of a rubber sheet when I was 3 to 5 years old. Just how that happened, I have NO idea and I remember having rubber panties put on em as a baby

Cloth diapers are also safer. You have to use throw-aways rgith out of the pack, hence you are subject oto the health and safety standards of whatever third world country they are made in and shipped from With cloth diapers, wherever they come from, you give the a good washing right out of the box. Thereafter, you know "where they have been" because you care for them yourself. Remember pet food laced with melanine?

[vvp39]

Another consideration is that using disposables is more public than using cloth diapers and plastic pants. The user of disposables will be bringing a big box of them into the house fairly often, or having them shipped to the house fairly often.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

Throw=aways are known for leaking at the siedes. They are also complex, made of several separate parts; body, fluff, SAP, cathers, etc. any of which, or the interface between any of which can fail or be defective at the start. This adds to the cost. Cloth diapers are not subject to these faults. They have a record of over a century of doing the job and have been stable that long. Disposables  keep being "New and Imporved" every 5 or so years, whinc tells me that the last version was not up to . As to quality of parts and workmanship, remember these were meant to be used one then tossed in the garbage, so what do you think is more important, quality or price, the relationship of which is necessarily nverse?it

If not disposed of properly, throw=aways have a strong potential to sprea disease and I would wager that ordinary landfills are not up to the task as they are not meant to handle things that toilets were meant to handle. They may be fine for hospitals or other skilled medical facilities that have strong protocols for dealing with them from intake to disposal. How much would you be willing to bet that these protocols are quite costly?

[ppdude]

What do you do with used, stinky diapers between washings? How many washings a week for adult diapers can be expected? Ffor me a load is 4-5 days and that's what's keeping me in the disposable game. Supply shortages and shipping problems may change that.

 

 

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

Where do you think diaper pails originated?

It depends how many diapers you have hand you you use them

People have beendoing this for over a century. Here is the link to "flufflovers" cloth diaper care site
https://fluffloveuniversity.com/

It describes care of baby diapers but one is as good as the otuer. I do have a bit about cloth diapers in RUBBER PANTIES 'R' US. Things such as types, foldig, making your own, etc

[waynecook52]

Get yourself a shouwer chair lay the diaper ond the chair and rinse it off.THEN LET IT DRY BEFOR PUTTING IT IN A PAIL.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

5 hours ago, waynecook52 said:

Get yourself a shouwer chair lay the diaper ond the chair and rinse it off.THEN LET IT DRY BEFOR PUTTING IT IN A PAIL.

That is the "dry pail" storage method

[waynecook52]

16 hours ago, Little Christine said:

16 hours ago, Little Christine said:

That is the "dry pail" storage method

Now Christine what do you think will happen to a diaper if you put it in the pail wet?It stands a god chance of going moldy.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

If it is just wet,not much if a diaper cake" is used that deodorizes and sanitizezes. I have no idea of what to do if there is caca involved as I am not that kind of girl. In some "wet pails" there was water and bleach, usually an oxygen bleach callede "Snowy" which also did athe job of a pre-wash soak. Ihave kept diapers in a "wet bag" for 4 or 5 days. Up to very recently urine was used as a bleach  to make whites white. However, you will have to wash the diaper i detergent. Dreft used to be the wash of choice, but they have changed the scent and it no longer has the "baby fresh" smell. Flufflovers recommends Tiode liquid If I rince out my diaper in the machine immediately I do not even have to wash it and it has no smell

When DPF was formed, the youngest legal members were born in 1963, before throw-aways became a thing by about 6 years and cloth adult diapers would remain dominant for about 7 years since there were no babyish diapers to latch onto. The thickers cloth diapers I every saw at that time was Edley Enterprises white flanne, beginnng in about 1995 or so and they looked the most babyish The DPF Baby Heaven diaper was thin by comparison. Most adult rubber panties were made of grainy material with only 3 being smooth: Corolyn's Kids, Comco and the ones from the company that published BLADDER CHATTER out of CT. Now, smooth material dominates the market and there are far kinds made of actual rubber, Rearz, Babykins Fetware and Protex than 6 years ago

[Stroller]

Wearing cloth full-time I need to wash every 2 days, as I have a full washing machine then.  I just put my used nappies in a plastic bucket with a lid, doing nothing else to them, and when I've filled 2 buckets it's 2 days since my last wash & I put them in the machine (60 deg C).  They don't start getting smelly in 2 days.  Soiled nappies are a different matter - I only occasionally have to deal with them, but they get quicker treatment & are in the wash as soon as I can do it.  I clean them as well as I can in the shower before putting them in the machine.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

In the case of babies, souled diapers are to be rinsed out in the toilet immediately. That has been the way of it for ust ever. Baby grap is very soft and mushy anyway so it is easier to get out of the diaper

[Little Sherri]

This is an interesting conversation. Entities that use diapers at a commercial level, such as hospitals and long-term care centers, did the math a long time ago, and they pretty much universally landed on the "disposables cost less" side of the equation. However, their greatest cost in that equation is labour, and we don't pay ourselves to wash our diapers. But, there is a question of what your time is worth. Laundering diapers takes time. Can you spend a couple of hours two or three times a week, transferring diapers from pail to washer, to dryer, and then back to your drawer or closet or whatever? 

As far as privacy goes, with respect to having diapers delivered, versus having a stash of cloth diapers on hand, the advantages and disadvantages depend upon your lifestyle. I share my household with my spouse, my kids, and also, occasionally, my in-laws, so if I had to run a load of diapers every couple of days, and then transfer them to the dryer, I'd have to do it at midnight for them to not get discovered at some point. So for me, I'd rather the UPS guy have some suspicions, than have my mother-in-law folding my plastic pants for me. The other aspect of privacy is concealability, and on that front, disposables are the clear winner, at least from my perspective. I wear diapers all the time, everywhere, and there are only limited circumstances under which I can entertain the bulk of a cloth diaper and plastic panties. Whereas, with disposables, I can choose something slim and cloth-backed for the gym, a medium-weight diaper for daily wear, or a big plastic diaper if it's just me and my wife at home. 

The environmental end of the debate has a lot of variables. Single-use plastic diapers that end up buried in a landfill don't break down for hundreds of years, and even before that, they were manufactured using feedstocks that include oil and natural gas, both of which have to be pulled from the ground, and, there is a lot of transportation involved in getting bulky products to your diaper drawer. So their environmental profile looks grim at first glance. However, cloth diapers are made from cotton that has a lousy environmental resume - it takes a lot of energy and thousands of gallons of water to grow and refine a few pounds of cotton. They somewhat make up for that by being very reusable, but, that re-use involves hundreds of gallons of hot water, which in most households means burning gas or electricity, and then the addition of chemicals, and then that water goes down the drain and needs to be treated. Plus the incoming fresh water has to be treated and pumped several miles, no small undertaking from an energy perspective, unless you're on a well. If you're on a well, then you're pulling groundwater out of an aquifer using an electric pump, heating it, running it through your washer, and then discharging it to a septic bed - there is no free lunch. Then there is the drying side of the process, which involves a lot of energy, be it electricity or gas,  unless you live close enough to the equator to be able to rely on the power of the sun year-round, and even then, having diapers drying on the line will not be an option for everyone... modern subdivisions feature houses on postage-stamp lots, so everyone's backyard is overlooked by half a dozen other households. 

All of which is to say, that whatever product you wrap your tush in has a cost-benefit profile, and not everybody has the option to go cloth, even if they'd like to, and, for those who do use cloth, believing that they're single-handedly saving the planet may be a bit of an overstatement. 

[vvp39]

"Single-use plastic diapers that end up buried in a landfill don't break down for hundreds of years"

Single-use plastic diapers have not even existed for "hundreds of years", nor have the plastics they're made of.

Whichever way you go in this debate, you will simply be making greater use of an already existing infrastructure...either hot water and detergent or your garbage can.

 

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

6 hours ago, vvp39 said:

"Single-use plastic diapers that end up buried in a landfill don't break down for hundreds of years"

Single-use plastic diapers have not even existed for "hundreds of years", nor have the plastics they're made of.

Whichever way you go in this debate, you will simply be making greater use of an already existing infrastructure...either hot water and detergent or your garbage can.

 

Landfill space is at a premium. For one thing, landfills are lined with a speciall clay. Also, you are adding toxins and sepsis  to a place not really meant to handle it. People do not want landfills  "inmy back yard". Sewer systems have been able to deal with these fro almost a centry. Up until the last 45 years, we used to burn trash (paper and the lie).. When that changed, the amount of stuff sent to the dumps, now landfills, was multiplieed considerably

[Little Sherri]

23 hours ago, vvp39 said:

Single-use plastic diapers have not even existed for "hundreds of years", nor have the plastics they're made of.

True enough, but I read a study, one of several out there, regarding archeological analysis conducted on core samples taken from a garbage dump that was operated through the 1960's and 70's, and closed in the early 80's, which was subsequently turned into a public park. They wanted to get an idea of what kind of transformation was occurring within the layers of compacted trash and soil that had been deposited over the course of a couple of decades, starting half a century ago. What they found was astonishing... including recognizable segments of hot dogs that had remained unaltered by the passage of time, perfectly preserved in an anaerobic environment at a constant temperature. 

Now, granted, the ingredients used in manufacturing hotdogs have always been suspect, but, that said, one imagines that even a wiener comprised of raccoon hide, boot leather and pork rectum is still mostly organic in nature, and if it managed to exist, frozen in time, for 5 decades underground, projections for the fate of plastics buried under there are going to be a multiple of that. And, indeed, the core samples contained a lot of shreds of, predictably, garbage bags, but also sections of some disposable diapers, and they showed little evidence of breaking down. 

Don't get me wrong - I wear mostly disposables. But the point stands - buried plastic diapers are going to be down there for a long time in a recognizable form, before they degrade into their constituent elements, which are, in any case, mostly hydrocarbons, so not exactly food for the trees and the worms. 

Perhaps the most rosy projections for the fate of landfills are that these studies also concluded that dumps operated before recycling programs came into existence actually contain more metal per ton of material than is required to run a profitable mining operation - substantially more, in fact. In the future, someone may decide that mining old dumps and recycling the contents is both profitable, and, "sustainable", and the covers from the Pampers of our youths will end up as feedstock for synthetic fuels or park benches. Or new diapers. 

[ValentinesStuff]

I remember the results of a study on how to make the breakdown of materials in landfills quicker. A University built a series of miniature landfill, about the size of a football field or so, an lined them. They filled each up and processed them in various ways. The most efficient way of speeding up decomposition was the addition of a single thing, that is banned from being added to landfills. That thing is water. 

[ppdude]

On 10/12/2021 at 11:13 PM, waynecook52 said:

Get yourself a shouwer chair lay the diaper ond the chair and rinse it off.THEN LET IT DRY BEFOR PUTTING IT IN A PAIL.

That sounds like a good idea. When I open the diaper pail it just about knocks me out. Minimizing the stink is always an issue. Thanks.

 

[DAQ]

Thank you all for your responses so far. I realized in the last week or so since I asked this question that it was irrelevant at the time because the times I have worn cloth diapers I haven't been able to wear for long because the legs elastics are too tight and get painful after a short time. I have bought a few pairs of different plastics pants to try and rectify it.

On 10/10/2021 at 6:41 PM, Little Christine said:

Awesome break down. Thank you!

 

On 10/11/2021 at 2:54 AM, Stroller said:

Polyurethane pants last a lot longer than PVC, and aren't affected by oils or vaseline. They don't get stiff.  I wash mine by hand daily.  These are pure polyurethane, not PUL

I have several pairs coming in the mail over the next week. among them are Polyurethane pants I can't wait to try.

On 10/14/2021 at 5:50 AM, Little Sherri said:

The environmental end of the debate has a lot of variables. Single-use plastic diapers that end up buried in a landfill don't break down for hundreds of years, and even before that, they were manufactured using feedstocks that include oil and natural gas, both of which have to be pulled from the ground, and, there is a lot of transportation involved in getting bulky products to your diaper drawer. So their environmental profile looks grim at first glance. However, cloth diapers are made from cotton that has a lousy environmental resume - it takes a lot of energy and thousands of gallons of water to grow and refine a few pounds of cotton. They somewhat make up for that by being very reusable, but, that re-use involves hundreds of gallons of hot water, which in most households means burning gas or electricity, and then the addition of chemicals, and then that water goes down the drain and needs to be treated. Plus the incoming fresh water has to be treated and pumped several miles, no small undertaking from an energy perspective, unless you're on a well. If you're on a well, then you're pulling groundwater out of an aquifer using an electric pump, heating it, running it through your washer, and then discharging it to a septic bed - there is no free lunch. Then there is the drying side of the process, which involves a lot of energy, be it electricity or gas,  unless you live close enough to the equator to be able to rely on the power of the sun year-round, and even then, having diapers drying on the line will not be an option for everyone... modern subdivisions feature houses on postage-stamp lots, so everyone's backyard is overlooked by half a dozen other households. 

All of which is to say, that whatever product you wrap your tush in has a cost-benefit profile, and not everybody has the option to go cloth, even if they'd like to, and, for those who do use cloth, believing that they're single-handedly saving the planet may be a bit of an overstatement. 

While I didn't mention it in my original post this is DEFINITELY something that has weighed on my mind. I live in Arizona and if I understand correctly we do a pretty good job of recycling water for residential uses. The morality of literally throwing water away does weigh on me.

Aside from the the cost and environmental reasons I have been seriously considering going 24/7 but at having another 50 or so years of life ahead of me I assume that before 2070-2080 single use plastics WILL be banned and while there may be exceptions initially for medical devices the noose will tighten further before I die. I want to ensure that I have something to use when that happens. I am working from home now. My current plan is to use cloth while at home and disposables out and about. I am hoping to have good results with products coming in the mail.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

What miight happen will be a panty and liner like the old Dryper of the early 1950's where the inner part is throw-away but the outer part is reusable. That way, the plastic part is  not tossed after on use (the Dryper panty was rubber) Robinson's in England was a pad and pullup panty. You might get a snap-on panty with a disposable liner that attaches in the same area as the snaps. The snaps on Gary panties are toward the frontg so you can sleep on your side without leaking, with a couple of hold-down straps in the crotch

[Soggy Bottom Boy]

I have been wearing cloth diapers since 1998. I switched to mainly cloth for two reasons. The cost of disposable diapers and the fact that I get nasty rashes after wearing disposables for a few days in a row. I am totally urinary incontinent so I would go through multiple disposables each day. I seldom get rashes from wearing cloth diapers. I have my own washer and dryer. 

Cloth diapers last several years. I normally purchase a half dozen every 3 or 4 years. I have several prefolds that are probably close to 12 years old. They get a little ragged over the years but they still do the job. During the day I wear contour diapers as they are less bulky under my clothes. 

Cloth diapers work great for me. With quality plastic pants they seldom give me any issues. I wash a load of diapers every 3rd or 4th day. After 3 days my diaper pail gets a little nasty.

[skizics]

I've given up on educating people about cloth diapering but I'll take another short stab at it.

I bought a Bolt of cotton gauze diaper cloth about 30 years ago and used it to make my diapers. It cost (back then) about 85 or 90 dollars and I still have around a third of it left but I haven't needed it because I'm STILL Using the same diapers today that I started with back then. (word of Advice... NEVER USE BLEACH ON COTTON DIAPERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Bleach Destroys Cotton!!!!!!!!! )

So cost of diapers $50 bucks.

Waterproof pants... Rubber is the best but it's the hardest to take care of, so try the Polyurethane enclosed elastic pants the Gary Manufacturing Co.

Waterproof pants $20 bucks each (you'll need at least three pair) $60 Bucks.

Total cost with inflation somewhere in the 150 to 200 dollar range and that is on the High side.

I could go into more detail but no one will pay any attention (I know this for years and YEARS of experience) and I doubt anyone will care about saving thousands and thousands of dollars on diapers. It's easier to buy the paper garbage, use it, and throw in the garbage.   Gurrr (sorry bout the negativity)

(Also... Read up on the P&G efforts to Make Cloth Diapers "Bad"... it worked!)

[Cruiser 03]

I bought the absolute Cadillac of cloth and pants and yes I over bought to be prepared, but so far 14 years and no car polish or gun cleaning cloths have been made , I generally have 4 wet and 4 messy on a good day when things work out that’s 4 diapers and my overnight makes 5.