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Disposable diapers (also known as Nappies) were invented in the 1940’s and slowly gained popularity due to their convenience. These handy crap-catchers eliminated the unpleasant task of (usually) the mother having to clean out the goodness so the diaper is ready for it’s next use.

It wasn’t until recent decades that the disposable diaper has really taken off globally. These time-savers mean you can simply throw all that “home-made organic produce” right in the trash. No unpleasantness, and lots of time saved.

There’s a down side to this convenience however, as you can probably guess from the title, as the average disposable diaper takes between 350 to 500 years to decompose.
This means that by the time your baby has grown up, bought a house, raised a family, worked all his/her life, retired and eventually died of old age, that 2.5 tonnes of diapers from your son/daughter won’t have even begun to decompose. It’ll still be sitting there in a hole, long after your grandchildren have passed away.

It’s an impressive statistic, but perhaps what’s more impressive is the sheer amount of diapers we throw out every single year: twenty seven billion of them – and every single one of them is still sitting in a landfill.
There they sit, each one a tightly wrapped bundle of urine and feces that partially and slowly decompose only over many centuries.

To give you an idea of how much waste that is, imagine each diaper could be squished into a coffee cup (which it probably could). A coffee cup fits about 10 fluid ounces (300 ml).
Multiply that by 27,000,000,000 every single year, and you end up with a final annual volume of around 843,750 home swimming pools filled to the top. And next year there’ll be more.

Things have the potential to change however after a recent survey concluded that apparently a third of parents would be willing to switch to the reusable cloth diaper, after hearing how their current disposable traits are affecting their child’s world – now and in the future.

The cloth diaper has also come a long way since you and I were using them as little poopy treasure-holders. No longer do you need a Michelin-man sized fece-fetcher, with safety pins each side.

Cloth diapers have come a long way

Some new-design cloth diapers even have a reusable synthetic outer (with velcro strips) allowing you to change the multi-layered cotton inside without spillage. Others (like the one above) are entirely cotton, but thick and multi-layered, giving more absorbency and softness.

It looks and feels like a disposable, but no plastics or untreated waste end up in landfill. Instead you throw the cotton section into a bucket of biodegradable disinfectant for an hour, then put it in the washing machine.

All you’ve used is water, which is renewable. Your baby will thank you later – especially if he or she grows up to be an eco-warrior.