Paper Trail: Confessions of a Diaper Hypocrite

How I tossed my environmental conscience into the landfill.

Guilt and worry—two special feelings I can't seem to shake, especially when it comes to the whole diaper debate.

One of the things I obsess about is what the next wave of Earth settlers will find when they dig through whatever remains of our civilization. I imagine squads of saucers deploying teams to puzzle over Crocs, rifle through broken Bakelite, and crack the code for LOL and OMG.

(Inevitably, this train of thought leads to my wide-awake paranoia about being one of the bodies they put into the alien museum—you know, like the mummies encased in glass at the British Museum? "What big hips they had," they'll say. "How short and wide they were!" After seeing the gift shop at the King Tut exhibit in Los Angeles a couple of years ago, I made my whole family promise never to make my death mask into a lolly pop or a pencil eraser or any other novelty item, thank you very much.)

And of course, what civilization excavation scenario leaves out the landfills? Our entire story is in the trash. I imagine the poor suckers who sort the stuff will end up with two piles that tower over everything else: skyscrapers of old cell phones and used diapers.

Now, I don't mind if the aliens go through my address book—but decades' worth of baby poop? TMI, people! Sure, it'll give them incontrovertible proof of our dietary habits, but really. Let's make them work a little for it, right? Also, couldn't they just reconstruct us all like the world's worst Jurassic Park knock-off? People of science laughed at me when I ranted about this, telling me that it was unlikely any DNA would be present. But then I read an article about the world's oldest poop—14,000 years old with DNA in tact!—and vowed that no one in our family would leave such a souvenir.

Most sources on the diaper debate—cloth vs. paper—will tell you that it's basically a wash when it comes to the environment. Paper products eat up trees and build up in landfills (up to 20 years to biodegrade!), while cloth diapers have pesticides in their past and require bejillions of gallons of water to scrub them clean. Even Bill Nye on his guilt-inducing show "Stuff Happens", which catalogues the environmentally unfriendly things we do in every room of the house, didn't give a definitive answer. The skeptic in me thought that maybe paper-diaper advertising fixed the fight—although I never stopped the TiVo long enough to confirm my suspicions.

Still, since almost every paper diaper is also individually wrapped in plastic before it's discarded, I couldn't help but think that reusable cloth diapers were the way to go. Cost is comparable, too, if you opt for a diaper service (those who wash their own cloth diapers come out slightly ahead). My parents gave us the best gift of all: the first few months on a diaper service. In fact, it was the same diaper service they'd used in my baby days—Dy-Dee Diapers is pretty much the only game in Southern California. And they are wonderful! Not only did they spirit away the mess and leave us fresh, clean diapers every week, but they also introduced me to exciting inventions. No more leaky, uncomfortable plastic pants for this generation! Now, there are snazzy covers that close easily with Velcro and these marvelous Snappi things that secure the diapers without pesky (and nasty!) pins.

So, the cloth experiment was off to a great start! Of course, we gave ourselves a special paper dispensation for travel. And when people came to visit (no need for visitors to have to go straight to the dry cleaners after stopping by, right?). And when we ran out of clean diaper covers. And when we had a surplus of paper diapers. And when we got lazy. Some weeks, we were probably 50/50. But over the holidays, we pretty much abandoned cloth altogether. No leaks, fast securing (a must when baby figured out how to roll over on the changing table), less bulk for baby, and easy disposal. Sold!

And sold out. It took me a week or two to admit I'd abandoned my principles for the sake of expediency. But today, I canceled the diaper service. Everyone tells me not to beat myself up. They say our contribution of waste is just a drop in the bucket—the very "everyone is doing it" argument that made me crazy when I was on the cloth side. It's the kind of thinking that giant landfills are made of. So, no, I DO deserve to feel bad about this. After all, my guilt will likely erode over the next few months—but our diapers won't!


Dy-Dee Diapers: *****
My paper cave-in: *