Softbums was pleased to be at the Living Green Expo at the Fair Grounds in St. Paul, MN this weekend! http://www.livinggreen.org/index-expo.cfm
It was so fun to meet some of our existing customers in person, and put faces to names, hear all the stories about their diapering experiences and mostly see all the babies!! My favorite part!
We talked to hundreds of super nice people, and even converted a couple people to cloth while at the show! Yay, cloth diapers!
I was surprised at how many fathers, and even older men who were not only interested in hearing about diapering alternatives, but also extremely impressed with our PerfectFit One-size Diaper system. I was so happy to have my husband Brian there with me to talk to the men. He absolutely loves using our diapers, and loves talking about our diapers too. I think it's really important to get the guys behind this stuff. They are a big part of parenting, and often I find when a guy is really educated on the importance of using cloth, and how it all works, he really gets behind it and can be a great help in educating others later on.
One of the demonstrations we had set up at the booth, was a plastic disposable diaper bag that was emptied, and filled with cloth diapers instead. It was a big "mega" pack of disposables, and we showed that a bag that size would last your baby about a week if filled with disposables. That same bag filled with cloth diapers would last your baby 3 1/2 years, or until potty training! That was a big eye opener to see it visually laid out there like that. Babies go through about 10,000 diapers on average per child. Disposables use crude oil, paper pulp, tons of chemicals, and endless amounts of wastewater in just their manufacturing alone! Then on top of that, add up all the transportation costs and oil used to deliver all these diapers to stores, for parents to go run to the store once a week or so to get more diapers, and it's about 4,000 lbs of solid waste going straight into the landfills that we have to live next door to. There can be all kinds of nasty things seeping from these disposables into our groundwater, and these diapers can take 500 years or more to decompose. They really don't have a number of years it will take, and any programs for recycling the diapers into anything usable has proven to be too costly, and polluting to make any sense. They are currently the #3 single product in the landfills.
There is one very simple and logical answer. Wash your diapers. The cloth alternatives are easy, inexpensive(about 10th of the cost) and make a huge, huge difference in our carbon footprint! Plus they are fun!
