The real environmental impact of babies' butts

Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at the messy issue of diapers and the environment:

At the tender age of 22, I was sitting at my desk, working diligently on some task for my first real job when an older colleague, who happened to be a new father, walked by. "I invented a new word this morning," he said. "Crapnel. It's a fusion of crap and shrapnel. Think hard before you have kids."

In related news, cloth diapers are bad for the environment, and the government doesn't want you to know about it. The pleasingly labor intensive and disgusting practice of using cloth diapers because they're better for the environment than those awful disposables manufactured in China by multinational corporations turns out to be a big lie. A government report showing that cloth diapers are bad for the environment was (God forgive me for this) leaked to a newspaper

New parents — especially first-timers — are the easiest target for snake oil salesmen, both commercial and political. When Victor was born, we tried using a diaper service for the first few months . . . partly for vague environmental reasons, but mostly because we were given the service as a baby shower gift by one of Elizabeth's close friends. It seemed like the "right" thing to do.

Fast forward three months, and we couldn't get out of the contract soon enough. The diapers were significantly less effective than the disposables, leading to more frequent cleaning of other clothes, they were not as comfortable for the baby, and the smell was inescapable in our small apartment. We'd been using disposables whenever we were away from home for more than a few hours (diaper bags are unwieldy luggage at the best of time, but when you're also carrying around cloth diapers, they become ticking time-bombs of odour, mess, and embarassment.

We got a lecture from several people after we switched, but there was no contest between the two from our experience. Now that the evidence shows that the claimed environmental benefit to cloth diapers is bogus, there's no reason other new parents should have to suffer the hard learning experience.