On a tip from my brother and sister-in-law, we are now saving the planet one butt-wipe at a time.
In an effort to continue to reduce waste, we have replaced disposable baby-wipes with 6" cloth squares cut from old t-shirts and a simple spray bottle filled with water. We simply dampen each cloth with the spray bottle as needed. The used squares go into the washing machine along with the diapers. Alright, so it's not like we are getting rid of our cars, but the little things count too.
Speaking of cleaning up, I saw this neat contraption on a toilet tank the other day:
In a nutshell, once the toilet is flushed, the clean water that is used to refill the tank is first piped to the faucet for hand washing. The average American flushes the toilet five times a day. If each person also uses a quart of water to wash their hands after each flush, then this little doohicky has the potential to save over 400 gallons of water per person each year.
It's not a new invention, apparently they are pretty commonplace in Japan.
About Me: Jeremy wears many hats, including substitute teacher, school garden educator, hike leader, youth group advisor, Gardener's Swap Meet coordinator, husband, and father. His lifelong quests include the search for the perfect burrito, and more recently, how to sprout an avocado tree from a pit.
they have one of these at the GRUB house. i think they are awesome!
Reply:
Actually, that is where I saw one.
Washing machine, eh? Prolly making your reduction in impact to the environment negligible. But(t), I can understand not wanting to hand wash in this instance.
A good point. My wife and I have gone back and forth on this one. One factor that we considered is that in addition to adding to the waste stream, using disposable diapers costs more (how much more depends on which website you look at and how quickly your child is potty trained). Of course, this does not figure in the value of ones time in actually laundering the diapers.
The other option is using a diaper service, which uses industrial sized washing machines and thus results in less water use per diaper. However, this service also costs more than laundering one's own diapers, but more importantly, we had issues with the "equipment"--all too often the cloth diaper did not fully contain the poop, and we had to wash the waterproof liner ourselves anyway. Another reason we dropped the diaper service is because our baby really did not like the feeling of a wet cotton diaper, regardless of "how wet," and we seemed to be changing a diaper 2-3 times an hour in the first few weeks.
Finally, water is still relatively cheap in Chico, and I would be naive to say that the price our city puts on water wasn't part of the equation, even if water is undervalued by ecological standards. If we lived in, say, Tucson, we might be making different choices.
This is not a black and white issue. Anyone else have thoughts?
For me it's just as much of a water issue as it is an energy and materials issue, I guess. Washers and dryers consume large amounts of energy relative to the energy and materials used to produce toilet paper. I dunno. Small potatoes, I guess. The effort and thought process are great. Props.
We try to use the solar powered dryer whenever it isn't raining (aka clothesline). And luckily, the cloth wipes take up a negligible amount of extra space in a washing machine load full of dirty diapers. However, the extra time it takes to deal with them as compared to a disposable wipe is something to consider.