It's obvious only if you save and reuse the same set of cloth diapers for 2 or more babies. (Which places some constrains on brand, durability etc.) If you have only one kid, I am not sure which side is environmentally more friendly; growing and processing all that cotton (not to mention the plastic for all the waterproof covers) uses a lot of water and energy...
We also got a good number of used diapers on Offer Up.
When we're done with our diapers, we will rehome them instead of throwing them out.
How does this change your calculations?
Someone else on here seemed confused about the logistics off the service. We lived in Brooklyn at the time. A big truck would drive around our neighborhood and pick up and drop off diapers from many people throughout the neighborhood at once. More amortization at work.
Also, one more thing: we're big on line drying. We will primarily line dry these diapers instead of drying them in a machine.
Oh, and one MORE thing: we got our current washer and dryer free from a friend who was about to throw them out when replacing them.
There are so many ways to mitigate and reduce environmental impact beyond the simple-minded apples-to-apples comparison many in this thread seem to be doing.
... or buy and sell second hand. Reusable nappies treated well retain surprising value.
energy is free, it comes from the sun.
cotton is free, it grows from the ground.
plastic is not free, there will never be more of it. I think that resolves the equation.
(this is an oversimplification obviously but I wanted to reframe it from "how much of our current resources does this action use" to "how much of our TOTAL resources does this action use")
i agree with your overall point though.
The energy saving would not be as clear to me, but i wouldn't be surprised if reusable were a better choice there as well, just not as clear cut.
The amount of waste generated by disposable diapers was a concern, and we tried reusable ones. But they leaked often, the absorption material in disposable ones is way better than the cotton pads you get with reusable ones.
I would be happy with a middle ground. Reusable outer "pants" and a disposable insert designed well to work with the reusable part, as plastic free as possible.
I never had any trouble with cloth diapers. You can always have a blow out with any diaper, but I didn't have any issues beyond that. Of course, there's some technique, but it's easy enough to find a YouTube tutorial if you need it. Snappies and decent covers help.
We used glass bottles and a diaper service (we're from Santa Cruz) and people made fun. Then right after there were questions about chemicals from plastic bottles and our friends understood.
A quick search to see if there are also concerns about diapers returns https://www.ehn.org/non-toxic-diapers
A service is super easy. You can still use disposable for edge cases if needed. Why risk wrapping your child in highest profit possible+maximum convenience chemical creations 24/7 for years? Convience+chemicals+corporate profit greed have proven to be the worst combination for healthy/safe products in our capitalist system.
What about this is obvious? Water usage, transportation, fabrication factors, different usage patterns; seems like there are many things to tease apart here.
With diapers, you have wash water, electricity, and a gas dryer in the mix.
Then you have people in this thread talking about services to pickup and wash them for you. How many trips car trips is that- 2 a week?
2. Think about the mass differences you’re comparing here. A standard plastic grocery bag is about 5 grams of material. A standard cloth bag is around 250. Cloth vs disposable diapers are approximately the same amount of material. This is the “gotcha, vegan! Iceberg lettuce is less efficient on a CO2 per calorie basis than beef! Eat more steak to be greener” type of argument.
3. You’re doing the thing contrarians often do of only counting one side of the ledger, while hand waving away the other. Disposable diapers require water, tree growing, tree cutting, tree transport, tree processing, bleaching, transport, packaging, product transport, disposal transport, disposal processing, etc etc. for each time a diaper is used. Really think about the full cradle-to-grave cycle of these things. Reusables must be washed, yes. But they, importantly, don’t require any of the other steps, which is, y’know, extremely significant. It’s not even remotely plausible single-use diapers are more resourceful than cloth ones.
You are right that we have to look at the full breakdown of the cradle to grave resource cost.
A washer and dry cycle is about 5 kilowatt hours, which is about the average household energy consumption in China or twice that in India.
Financially, in California it's about $3 per wash for power before accounting for water, soap, ect.
Let's say you got 10 diapers per day and washing every 2 days. That's 15 cents and 250 watt hours per diaper use.
American use a lot of electricity, so washing diapers would be about a 10% household increase
Some things working in favor of cloth diapers here are general greening of the grid, mitigating issues with electricity consumption.
Beyond that, line drying diapers works very well and even preserves the life of the diapers.
Cloth diapers hold their value extremely well and can easily be bought/sold/given away on sites like OfferUp or groups like Buy Nothing.
ALso, "2 car trips per week": do you have no idea how this works? No diaper service in their right mind would send out cars to make bespoke trips to individuals. They're done using a big truck on a schedule to amortize the cost of pick up and drop off as much as possible.
Of course if you have a washing machine you just launder them like any other item of clothing.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c4096ed915...
Example: https://www.diaperstork.com