Wednesday, November 12, 2008

We were walkin' in high cotton

So I read my wife’s latest blog, and it turns out she has plans to blog about the pros and cons of cloth diapers. Well, little does she know that I’m going to beat her to it.
The idea of using cloth diapers first came to me during my Green Engineering Design class one day when a “Life Cycle Assessment” on cloth diapers was discussed. It turns out that although it takes water, energy, and detergent to use cloth diapers, it is still much better, environmentally, to go cloth. This is especially true if you use them for more than one child.
Dan and Natalie brought it to our attention that if a newborn uses 10 diapers a day (I will confirm/correct this number sometime in the next 4 months), you would go through 100 diapers in ten days, or 300 in a month. Even if you had a farm, and you used compostable diapers, you could not find a place to compost that many diapers!!! Another thing about the new compostable diapers is that, like many other compostable things that go into a landfill, they don’t decompose! This is mainly because land fills are almost completely devoid of oxygen which, beside bacteria, is all that is needed for decomposition.
Anyway, getting back to cloth diapers… I have realized that even if Valerie does just half the laundry, it will be a lot of work to do with a little boy who can’t be left alone upstairs in our apartment, so I gave her the choice on what we will do for diapers.
It looks like she is going to give the cloth a try. Kudos for your enthusiasm Val!
My personal opinion on the issue, is that we need to choose our battles. We would die of eco-legalism if we analyzed every choice to such a degree as it pertains to the environment. However, I think this is a good battle to fight. I have done an internal “sensitivity analysis” (if you aren’t a modeling nerd, I mean I have decided which battles will have the most impact) and I think this is a really big impact. Imagine any part of the created world, piled with 1000 dirty diapers, uncompostable for like a thousand years. I don’t want it in my back yard, and it’s really just wild that our solution is land filling. Land, and specifically soil, is the source of our fertility and, when done in scale, is the proper destination of our waste. Do we really have the hubris or ignorant arrogance, as a culture, to both sentence and punish a certain place and its soil to uselessness until the Kingdom actually comes?
Now, I need to say that I have no disrespect for ANYONE using disposable diapers. I have only changed one diaper in my life, and I have never washed a whole load of dirty ones. In addition, we all live in a culture that deems our waste disposal system completely normal. I have never, ever, looked at a child in disposable diapers and had a negative thought, except that poop is gross. Plus, I was ecstatic to see that Henry Kee was a garbage man for Halloween…prolly my favorite Halloween costume ever, except when Jim was a three-hole punch.

I do happen to have a solution to the diaper issue. If one of you gives me, say, one hundred g’s, I’ll start a company making anaerobic digesters that turn all the carbon in disposable diapers to natural gas. Then the rest can be sold as a soil amendment. We will make a billion, or maybe even a million dollars. Seriously.
I’ve got to go. Val is meeting me downstairs to talk to a lady who sells cloth diapers at the farmer’s market. Ha! Farmer’s market. What a couple of bleeding heart hippies.
And just to give myself an out, Val recommends that I tell you we are willing to change our plan on diapers. If we decide to go disposable, well, I guess there’s no hiding it at that point, so you’ll know.

4 comments:

aly said...

I don't know if you knew this, but that was the second time Henry was a garbage man for Halloween. He was also one two years ago. He actually wanted to be a garbage truck this year, but I did not have the wherewithal to make him a costume.
I used cloth with Henry and loved it. He never had diaper rash. Ever. And hardly ever leaked. I tried to with Ceci, but ultimately, I just could not keep up with all the laundry. I wish they had a diaper service in this town. Even if they didn't deliver, but you could just drop off dirties and get cleans. Something to think about...

Ethan Stonerook said...

I was just telling Natalie that the other day! Aly, how bout this, you and me go get a business loan to buy some industrial washers and some advertising, hook up with Publix to put our "collection bins" outside their stores (odor free, or course), and we start making billions. Seriously. I'm serious.

Travis McKinney said...

is val going to be a stay at home mom? because i don't think you can have cloth diapers in day care.

Ethan said...

Hopefully Val will be a stay at home mom. That is the plan right now. We are trusting God to provide for us, because we trusted Him when He said it was time to start having babies. Right now she is working on starting to sell crafty stuff online, and she may work one day a week. We'll just have to wait and see. I think with the right marketing, including, ahem, graphic design, she could make somewhere near what we would need for her to make in order for her to stay at home. On a related note, I just applied for a job with Alachua County's Dept. of Environmental Protection. I am qualified for the job, and I'm going into their office tomorrow to drop off a resume. If I got this job she could stay at home for sure. Please pray!