My mom used to use cloth diapers on my youngest brother, in an effort to preserve the environment. The other five of us were spared of this embarrassment. We often felt bad for him, waddling around with a cloth pinned between his legs, encased in a plastic bubble underpants, the loser, while all of his “friends” wore the more fashionable Pampers. Even Luvs were cooler. Then, my mom would save up the dirty cloths in a bucket of water, and every few days she would wash them, and hang them up to dry.
When I had my first child, I was all about Pampers. The tiny preemie diapers were the size of a slice of American Cheese and smelled powdery fresh, like the head of my old doll. They brought back all the memories of my years of playing house, of making imaginary diapers out of paper towels and tape, of dreaming of one day having a real baby to call my own… and I finally had it. I felt fulfilled.
But when I had my second child soon after the first, and had two kids in diapers, I began to notice how rapidly my diaper pail would fill up. Garbage bags full of waste, wrapped in shopping bags and held together by another, larger bag, seething and malodorous. And I imagined how if every person in the neighborhood who had a baby would produce one of these bags once or twice a week, how the world must be full of bags of dirty diapers, that would likely sit, for years, encased in layers of plastic wrap, baking in the hot sun in a landfill. On an even larger scale, I could picture the whole world with their diaper pails, and a tower of waste that would reach the moon. I sounded like my mother.
I needed to make a change. I looked into other, more eco-friendly, options. The washables seemed too primitive, and I didn’t want to fill up my laundry machine with human waste products. But I found an option that boasted “flushable diapers.” It was a washable outer pant that looked and functioned like a diaper but was patterned and cute, and it had this thick pad that you put inside to absorb all waste. Then you would take the pad and flush it in the toilet.
Flush a thick pad in the toilet? Sounds impossible in Teaneck, where the plumber explicitly said to only use thin one-ply Scott toilet paper because the pipes can’t handle any more. Fear not; because this product came with a stick (and a suction cup, so that you can affix it to the wall, to display for all children to see… and touch) that you use to chop up and stir the waste products plus diaper pad in the toilet, like a big soup in a cauldron. Another option is that you can add the wet-only diapers to your compost pile in your backyard. We didn’t have a compost pile, but I figured, why not just throw them out on the lawn and let them disintegrate there? That way we could cancel the gardener from doing a growth-treatment; we clearly had all the fertilizer ourselves.
I went for the chopping-up/stirring option. It was bad. Vulgar. I contemplated riding off on a broomstick and casting spells on evil people. It really did disintegrate in the toilet water if you stirred hard enough, but then you had to wash and dry the stick and hang it back up for display, and for people to casually touch, and say, “What’s this for?” before jumping away in revulsion, when you explain it’s your toilet-stirrer.
And so, I lasted two flushes with this product. Two pads, and threw the rest away, creating more waste in the earth, because they were likely encased in a garbage bag and not free to nourish any crops. I went back to Pampers, guiltily, because the alternatives were just not suitable to my lifestyle, but felt happy that I made my impact on saving the earth by using two less diapers.
(**Author’s note: Just because this product wasn’t right for me doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a try!!)
Sarah Abenaim is a freelance writer living in Teaneck. She can be reached at [email protected].
By Sarah Abenaim
