Cloth Diapering Pt. III - "Number 2," and Washing Diapers

This is a great (and very extensive!) chart of cloth diaper-friendly detergents and their ratings and qualities. I love finding resources like this that someone took the time to create and share. Laundry costs for cloth diapering are less than the constant expense of disposable diapers, and if you are a greenie like me, you'll feel much better not adding to the baby poop sitting in the landfills. Did you know a disposable takes 500 years to break down? And that throwing out your baby's poopy diapers is a violatoin of the World Health Organization mandate, that human waste not be allowed in landfills? Every parent and caretaker of babies is supposed to be scraping the poop into the toilet with TP and flushing it. Which is funny, because that's the number one reason I hear parents give for not cloth-diapering - "it's gross; I don't want to touch the poop." Hmm.

With all the cool things that have been invented in the past decade, including diaper sprayers that attach to your toilet, and flushable liners, cloth diapering can be so easy and minimal on the gross-out factor. I feel good that our choice to cloth diaper is going to benefit humankind. I find it sad that it's the norm in our country to send off little "diaper bombs" to the landfill every week, never thinking of how we'll deal with it in a few years. Hubs made an impact to me when he said, "Well, now we know that my baby poop is still out there somewhere, preserved within a disposable diaper from 30 years ago." That was gross enough for me to commit to cloth 100% :)