Prior to my pregnancy I decided I wanted to use cloth diapers rather than disposables. Our children inherit our world so I try to be green and conscious of my impact, other than being green going with cloth diapers saves green ($).
In a prior post I estimated my total cost for building my cloth diaper stash would be around $300. At this point I believe I have around 33 diapers with inserts. My mother bought me 6 bumgenius diapers she found at a yardsale, my mil bought us a pack of CBI (charcoal bamboo inserts), a friend bought one Kawaii goodnight, I'm buying 10 bumgenius diapers from my sister ($80), I purchased 12 Kawaii Goodnight Diapers ($68), 5 Alvababy diapers ($28), and 2 inserts ($1).
Total Spent: $177
I'm super happy to say I've only spent $177 on our babies cloth diapers; they are all one size so they should fit her now til she is potty trained. I'm going to try to sell some of the Kawaii for $10 each, which would make my total closer to $120... although then I would probably buy more Alva's bringing my total back to around $140-$150.
The average age in the US in 2003 for children to be potty trained is 37 months; unfortunately I couldn't find more recent figure. Assuming you change your baby around 10 times a day you would go through 10,656 diapers from birth til potty training. Over ten thousand diapers PER child, and it is estimated they take from 250-500 years to decompose, I'm not okay with leaving that in the landfills ruining our world for future generations. In addition to the long lasting environmental impact of disposable diapers is the financial cost. I went on amazon and looked up diapers, the price varied from .13 to .40 a diaper depending on brand making the total cost for disposables til your baby is potty trained $1,385-$4,262 (not accounting for waste due to diaper size).
I will post pictures of my stash once I have all of it, I'm getting the diapers from my sister after Christmas and the majority of my diapers are in the wash at the moment getting prepped. The picture at the top does show some of my stash as I do have all of the diapers pictured, but if I manage to sell the diapers I want to then I'll lose a couple of those designs.
My savings by going cloth versus disposable I would estimate at around $3,000. I had three huge motivations for going cloth:
1. Chemicals, there are harsh chemicals in disposables that I don't like so if I did go disposable it would be a natural brand like 7th gen (what I am currently using as I got sposies to use til her cord fell off), natural brands are more expensive...
2. Environment
3. Financial
#1 explains how I got my rough $3,000 figure. I based it on the current cost of 7th gen diapers, but went with a rough average as the cost is different based on diaper size and there is no way of knowing how long your child will be in each diaper size.
EDIT: Baby girl is back in 'sposies. We had to buy 2 48 packs of luvs and hopefully when those run out she fits into her cloth diapers... right now they are just too big on her. We spent $15 on the 2 packages of luvs and if you are going with sposies and aren't gonna do 7th gen then I'd recommend Luv's, they are cheaper than Huggies or Pampers and IMO are just as good.
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