I am curious if cloth diapering has impacted the rest of your lives in any way? Inspired any other green lifestyle changes? Personally, the use of cloth diapers opened up a gateway, in a sense, to a greener more eco-conscious life for my family.Having used disposables on my twins for at least the first 4 months of life I was no stranger to taking out the garbage and boy did we know how to make some garbage. Usually it was so heavy I'd actually have to wait for my husband to get home to lift it out of the can and bring it outside. This seemed like almost a daily routine.
Suddenly, after starting cloth, I realized that I could take the garbage out! It wasn't loaded with disposables and we also weren't having to take it out as often. Very quickly I realized, what's the sense in using cloth diapers if we aren't also going to recycle? We called our local sanitation department and had our recycling bins delivered a few days later.
After getting the hang of recycling we added two more bins to accommodate all of our recyclables. The end result was that we were only having to take our garbage out once a week and we were putting three bins full of recycling out twice a week! It felt good.
Currently I'd say we're somewhere on the "spectrum of green" between recycling, cloth diapering, purchasing more reusable goods as opposed to disposable ones, attempting to compost (although you might just call it feeding the raccoons), making our way towards eating more healthily, and trying to curb ours and our kids wasteful tendencies.
Could we be doing more? Absolutely! But baby steps are better than no steps at all.
Has cloth diapering led you towards making any additional eco-friendly changes or were you as green as could be before starting to cd?
I'd love to hear your comments!
6 comments:
CDing was like a gateway for us too! Since we started using cloth we have also started recycling. I figured if I wasn't going to be throwing away anymore diapers, I might as well not throw away our paper, plastic bottles, glass, etc!
Most of the houses we have lived in have had clothes lines, but I rarely used them. I begged my husband to put one up at our new house this summer to hang cloth diapers on. Now, I use it all the time instead of the dryer.
I also had him make me a little spot in the backyard so I could have a compost pile. I can't believe how much that cuts down on trash too!
What a beautiful blog :)
I started cloth diapering to save money. That was my ONLY motivation, I could have cared less about the environment (sorry to admit!)
But now little by little I am making better choices. Yes, most of them are economically driven still, but going green saves green! I use less electricity, drive less/walk more and am trying to learn more about eating organic. (the organic foods is going to take a lot of talking to my husband to convince though)
I am definitely more aware of what goes into our garbage cans since deciding to go cloth and hearing all the "landfill" talk on the cloth diapering blogs, etc.
It has almost become a game for me... just how few bags of trash CAN we manage to put out every week.... last week it was 3.... can we get any less than that???
We used disposables for the first few weeks until we were able to purchase cloth and after seeing the amount of trash we threw out I did start to recycle. I think that using cloth diapers has made me less lazy when it comes to alternatives that are healthy for the planet. I mean most of the things people can do to minimize their impact takes a little extra effort but once you try one thing it doesn't seem so hard to do more, and some are so enjoyable, like hanging out the diapers on a bright sunny day while my sweet boy plays in the grass with a ladybug!
I agree that cloth diapering has been a gateway for me too. I've started replacing our cleaning stuff with greener choices and we put up a cloths line. I also try to use our reusable bags at the grocery store instead of plastic. They're all little steps but every little bit helps and now I'm much more aware of other things that I could be doing to help out our environment!
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