Advantages of Cloth Nappies
1) Avoidance of escaping poo!!
Ever had to change your child’s clothes because they had poo all up their back? Were they wearing a disposable nappy by any chance??
With cloth nappies, the poo is contained where it should be – in the nappy. Cloth nappies are a snugger fit, and if using a two-piece system, you have both the snug fitting nappy plus the outer wrap to keep everything where it should be.
2)Cost
By the time your baby is potty trained you could use 4,000 to 6,000 disposable nappies. This will cost a minimum of £488 and maybe as much as £732. By comparison you only need from 25-30 real nappies costing as little as £185 including the washing! In addition many local authorities offer incentives including cash back.
Using the same nappies on your second or third child saves you even more than on the first! (Source:The Real Nappy Campaign)
3)Comfort
For all those children who react to the dyes, perfumes or absorbency chemicals in disposable nappies, the disposable nappy companies have now added a “sensitive range”. The very existence of this range speaks volumes about the claims for protection against nappy rash that disposables supposedly offer.
There is also your own home comforts to think about too. When using real nappies, you flush the poo straight down the toilet, so no lingering smells. With disposables, you have a smelly bin until bin day. Any remaining smell on a real nappy is contained within a lidded nappy bin. The myth about smelly nappy bins is exactly that – with the lid on, no smell comes out at all.
And to conclude the section on comfort, the next time you go underwear shopping, consider the choice between disposable paper pants and cotton ones – now think about what your babies choice would be.
4)Toilet Training
Who knows for sure whether babies in cloth nappies potty train before their disposable nappy wearing peers, however, a child in cloth nappies knows when they are wet, and so makes the connection between bladder release and a wet nappy. It is this which is the vital first step in toilet training.
5)Environment
Choosing cloth nappies reduces the rubbish in your bin therefore reducing rubbish going to landfill. Disposable nappies make up about 2.6% of the average household rubbish in a year. This is equivalent to the weight of nearly 70,000 double-decker buses. If you lined up the buses from front to end they would stretch from London to Edinburgh. That’s a lot of waste. Most disposable nappies don’t break down and biodegrade either so they are just left sitting in landfills full of hazardous waste.
Using cloth nappies reduces the amount of waste sent for incineration and also the amount of energy and non-renewable resources used to produce disposables.
Advantage of disposables
We should also mention the advantages of disposable nappies as there are more and more environmentally friendly disposable nappies on the market today.
They are compact to carry around
Almost everyone knows how to use them
Many shops sell them including garages
They take about 1 minute less per nappy change than cloth nappies
You don’t have to drop the poo into the toilet – you can just wrap it up out of sight (although that is against World Health Organisation Guidelines, for health reasons)
You don’t have to put on any nappy washes or hang the nappies up to dry