A question about the basics

[DavinaT]

Hi,
Sorry to start a new thread but I don't see this covered in the basics or sticky's.
Creches here will not take cloth diapered babies (I'm in Ireland)| -period .

So, just wondering given that mothers here would only do it for 6 months max unles they extend their maternity leave (unusual) what are the environmental benefits over the short term, considering the amount of detergent and electrcicty required for laundry.
Thanks to all who can help.

[veedeepee]

I'm assuming a creche is a daycare? I haven't done an analysis or a lot of research on electricity+water usage of cloth vs. production+disposal of disposable diapers...so I can't fully address your question. However, even if your child is in daycare after 6 months, you can still use cloth when he/she is at home in the evening and night. So it's not as though you'd have to completely ditch the cloth diapers at 6 months.

In my experience, us cloth diaper folks tend to LOVE using cloth. Different people have different reasons for loving it, but it just feels...right to many/most of us. For that reason, I suspect it may be difficult to find an unbiased analysis of all the costs (not just monetary cost) of using each type of diaper, in terms of resources. It seems to me that when I've seen analyses like that, they're being done by people advocating cloth diapering, so I'm not so sure they're unbiased. I have also seen analyses by people who just don't want to use cloth, so they're trying to justify the use of disposables by going on about how much water cloth requires. Either way, they're not being totally objective. Now that I'm thinking about this...I'm off to search for a scientific study. I'll post again if I find something.

[veedeepee]

Well, a brief search of some journal articles was disappointing. Most of the articles I found were written by people hired by companies who make disposable diapers...sheesh.

Here is one article with a nice break-down of resource issues, though:
http://www.nenesdiaper.com/images/Th...r_Decision.pdf