Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
My first encounter with cloth diapers was a couple decades ago and the safety pins scared me to death. I was afraid I'd kill a baby with those. Everyone I knew (including people I'd paid for a month of diaper service for, when that was requested at their baby showers) used disposables (at least, that's what I always saw them using, but we'll return to that in a moment). I figured if the convenience was that important, there was no way in hell I'd either give anyone trouble over using disposables, nor did I expect to do anything else. When my friends all come to the same conclusion, I believe them.
A number of lifecycle studies have been done on the relative impact of cloth vs. disposables. Those done by the disposable diaper industry, predictably, say disposables have little impact. But in general, these studies have enough variables that can be tweaked in enough ways that it's hard to know where the truth lies. If you live in an area where water is plentiful, and landfill is scarcee, it's probably marginally more eco-friendly to use cloth. If you live in an area where water is scarce and landfill space is plentiful, disposables make more sense. Which one causes more diaper rash seems to be baby-specific, although frequent diaper changes definitely help, as does letting the baby air out for a while at least once a day.
The longer you diaper (whether as backup for elimination communication, or in the more usual way), the more impact. It makes some sense to consider infant potty training (none of this abusive stuff; check out Laurie Boucke's book, Infant Potty Training for a cross cultural description of how to do this). Babies feel so little moisture against their skin in disposable diapers that manufacturers make training pants that feel wetter to encourage babies to use a potty. Cloth diapers naturally encourage babies to potty train earlier through this mechanism.
In much the same way that disposables have gotten better closures, more absorbent and are trimmer fitting since they were introduced, cloth diapers have also been redesigned, although you would never know it if you only shop at Target and drug stores. One strategy has snaps on diaper and diaper cover (the diapers are swapped more often than the cover, which mostly prevents leaks onto you and your friends and furniture). Others involve folding a traditional flat diaper into a cover and then velcro-closing the cover on. There are also all-in-one diapers that basically connect a diaper and diaper cover. And there are pocket diapers, which allow you to slide additional absorbent material under a wicking layer to soak up more pee if your baby pees a lot or very quickly. I didn't know about any of these, until a friend handed me a box containing a whole bunch of this stuff which she had never used. It had been given to her by another friend who I was slightly acquainted with. With no one to tell me how any of this stuff worked, I read tags to find brand names, googled them, looked at pictures and before I could figure it out had to return to actual child care (as opposed to theoretical child care, which is what this book, fundamentally, is). I wish I had listened to the other (male) friend who told me to buy a laptop before having the baby. In any event, I eventually called Baby Bunz, and they sent me a catalog which had helpful diagrams that I could look at while breastfeeding. I didn't buy covers from them (I then realized I had plenty), but I did order a nifty diaper pail with a top that locks closed and includes a filter to keep the smell down, some really cool wooden toys, and a bunch of slightly larger flat diapers for when the wee one outgrows the current batch.
It took me a week or so, but we got the hang of cloth diapering. We use olive oil and air drying to keep rashiness down. We still use two or three disposables per night. I'm still working on consolidating laundry so I can do it less often, which is mostly a function of using the diaper pail and having enough diapers. I don't know whether you could do this if both parents worked (it would depend on convincing child care to play along, I would imagine), or even if you would want to, but if you are staying at home anyway, this is not noticeably harder than disposables and it seems to be marginally cheaper, even with fairly deluxe diapers. And there are no safety pins involved.
Recently I realized that the diaper covers we were using for him were way too small, so I ordered the next size up, once I found a place to buy them (remember, we were given a lot of this stuff). Then of course we had to come up with a different solution for putting diapers in the cover because the old diapers didn't fill the space enough to avoid leaks. We're currently doubling up with the old diapers and using the next size up of cloth diapers I had bought earlier and then concluded were too big to use. We had been using them has spit cloths, which meant we started using a separate set of too-big diapers as the new spit cloths. The moral for me is that whatever you buy for diapering that isn't useful for diapering has a reasonable chance at being useful later, or for another purpose, assuming it is cloth and relatively flat.
The presence of this section indicates that our hopes of getting rid of the diapers very early went unfulfilled. Teddy continues to be nighttime dry, and we're hoping that if we don't fly anywhere for six months and have a nice, stable home routine and go about toilet learning in a more typical way, we won't be doing this for years to come.
In retrospect, I think I should have tossed all the hand-me-down cloth diapers and covers. A lot of them had dead elastic around the leg openings and they leaked. If you are going to cloth diaper, buy new covers; you can use the diapers themselves until they fall apart or you cannot clean them to your satisfaction. We tried covers with snaps, covers with velcro, and covers with both. We liked the covers with just velcro best. There are a couple of different kinds of velcro out there. After seeing the differenc on Teddy's legs, I think it's worth it to pay more for less scratchy velcro. Absolutely do pre-wash the diapers in hot water several times if at all possible; it'll help shrink them and encourage them to be more absorbent. Flat, thin, birdseye diapers are really cheap and quite versatile. You can layer them and fold them in different ways as your baby grows. Prefolds are less versatile, but once your baby is a yearish, they'll work just as well and the size changes more slowly.
We use a very basic, hypoallergenic laundry detergent and we never use fabric softener, so we wash our diapers and covers the way we wash everything else. Even if you aren't doing elimination communication per se, if you get a kid out of a soiled diaper quickly, the diaper will remain largely stain free. Feces smooshed into diapers stain horribly compared to ones which rest there momentarily.
It's worth it to have a diaper pail up and downstairs. People have varying opinions about diaper pails. We don't put water in ours. We do have ones that lock, rather than just a plastic bin with a lid. That's mostly because Teddy would otherwise spill the contents onto the floor when he decides it's time to move the pail around. The ones we got have a built in carbon filter; it helps keep the odor down in the room a lot, as long as the pail is usually sealed shut. We rinse the pail and lid when we do a load of diapers. We do a load of diapers whenever we have more diapers than fit in one pail. We have a pail upstairs and one down.
We use Burt's Bee's diaper ointment or Boudreaux's Butt Balm when he looks rashy.
We used a combination of cloth and paper on all of our travels until the February 2007 trip to Disneyland, at which point I said no more. We used disposables the entire time, and by the end of the trip he was regularly waking up with a full diaper. We were relieved to return to cloth upon our return.
We have a couple of zippered cloth wet bags with some kind of waterproof lining that we use on outings. While we use covers and diapers most of the time, we've had six all-in-ones for outings for several months now, and I got another dozen to make it easier for child care and to use instead of training pants.
A General Discussion of Baby Ooze
A General Discussion of Toilet Learning
Our Experience with Elimination Communication
A Look Ahead: Toilets and Toddlers
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen
Created February 3, 2006 Updated February 22, 2007