Things I Like: gDiapers

These little contraptions from Australia are really gaining a foothold here in the U.S.!

It seems that one of the eternal baby questions - cloth or disposable? - has finally met its match. The solution? gDiapers! Why? They're flushable! Yes! FLUSHABLE!! Woo-hoo!

When I first saw them in the baby aisle of our local Whole Foods, I promptly sat down in the middle of the aisle and read all about them. I had been using Seventh Generation for Olivia when we traveled outside of the house for more than 10 minutes (we use cloth at home), but I still felt terrible about using disposable diapers. It takes about 500 years for a disposable diaper to degrade! And some statistics state that the average child will use around 7,000 disposable diapers before becoming toilet trained around 2 ½ years of age! And that 20 billion disposable diapers end up in landfills every year! Bleck!

"Holy cow!" I thought, "How am I going to make a difference?"

Well, first of all, we decided to use cloth. And it was pretty awesome, because cloth is softer on baby's skin (Olivia has had one (1) case of diaper rash to date, and she's almost two years old!), not to mention that we have a great diaper service which means that we don't have to trek down three flights of stairs to our coin-op laundry and spend a bazillion dollars washing the diapers numerous times in hot water!

But what about when we go out on the town? Who wants to lug around a duffel bag full of clean (and then dirty) cloth diapers? Not me! Enter gDiapers (with a glorious fanfare)!

They work similarly to cloth, in that there is an insert which one covers by a waterproof cover. But they are less bulky, are 100% biodegradable, and you can flush them (without the cover of course).

They are a bit more expensive than your cheap disposables, but they are comparable to Huggies, and, when paired with cloth, are a lot less expensive - particularly on the earth.

And that's really the bottom line. Don't loose sight of the fact that the money that you make is a tool - some may say a gift from the Creator - to be used in the best way possible. And being a steward to the earth (another Divine gift), is to me a vital consideration when using my purchasing power.

Read more about gDiapers here. Or ask me a question - I have loads of info on the things, and even some cool coupons. : )