First, I wanted to find out how many diapers a baby will go through in a day to find out how many I'll need to buy. Maybe I'm naive, but I was honestly thinking a max of ten per day - on a bad day - would be about right. But then I found this website, and this website and this website, all which suggest far more - up to 20 diapers per day for a newborn (especially, it seems, in cloth diapers - evidently because you can tell sooner when your baby is wet). However, that number goes down as the child gets older. So, to come up with an average for the first two years, I'm going to pick 15 diapers per day.
Next, I needed to know how much 15 diapers a day would cost me for two years buying a leading brand. I picked Pampers - really for no reason other than I know it's a common, familiar, mainstream brand. From the first three pages of the website selling Pampers, I chose six boxes of diapers at random and figured out how much each individual diaper would cost. The cheapest I found was $0.20; the most expensive was $1.32. All six diaper prices averaged at $0.58 per diaper. At 15 diapers a day, that's $8.70 per day on diapers. Over two years, that comes to $6,351. Plus, and for me and Kelly this is a big plus, that means 10,950 diapers that we just threw into a landfill that took 7,227 cups of petroleum to produce and will take the next 500 years to fully decompose (I'll cite that info for you in a bit).
OK, now I look at cloth diapers. The first place I looked at in Boise is Nature's Own Diapers. This is a diaper service - they bring their customers 80 diapers per week every week and take the used diapers back to their facility for the laundering. That means I don't have to wash any diapers. Ever. Their price is $17.25 per week. At $17.25 per week, that's only $1,794 over the course of two years. That's a difference of $4,557. (Incidentally, if we use an average of 10 diapers per day over two years, Pampers still comes out at $4,234 for two years - still a savings of $2,440 over two years for cloth diapers).
In the beginning, with a newborn in cloth diapers and the baby peeing more often and me and Kelly getting used to the whole diaper-changing-pee-schedule-parenting thing, we may go through more than the originally allotted 80 diapers per week. I figure that during that time I can either wash some or use a more Earth-friendly version of disposable diapers, like the ones offered by Seventh Generation (which come out at about $.36 per diaper, or $3,942 for 15 diapers a day for two years). Or, I bet I could get more one week or have them change out my supply earlier than after one week in the beginning.
There was another option listed in the Idaho Statesman article called Monkey Bottoms, which carries far more than just diapers. On this site, they recommend starting with 36 diapers, which, they tell me, means I'll be washing diapers every two days (which sounds like a lot of work to me). In the newspaper article, the owner says it costs about $150-200 to get started with her product, and that the initial start-up will last for about six months, depending on the baby's size. So for comparison's sake, let's figure that I have to spend $200 on cloth diapers every six months for the first two years. That's only $800. However, then we have to figure in that I'm washing a load of diapers every two days. Then I have to add in cost for laundry detergent, water and the time it takes to wash that much laundry. Right now, I only wash about two to three loads per week. And sometimes even that seems overwhelming. I can't imagine multiplying that by four or five times a week.
And because I said I would cite my stats for petroleum, etc., here's a page on the benefits of using cloth diapers. And here's another one. And another one. And another one. (And while we're discussing diaper type benefits, I couldn't find any benefits to using disposable diapers on either the Pampers or the Huggies websites. I did, however, find this bland comparison site. And this one too.)
So, after reviewing all the information, it looks like Kelly and I should go by Nature's Own Diapers and ask some questions to get a better feel for the whole diapering process.
By the way, I was curious, so I did some more math. Here's what I found:
Huggies averaged at $0.36 per diaper, meaning $5.40 per day at 15 diapers each day, or $3,942 for two years.
Luv's averaged at $0.57 per diaper, meaning $8.55 per day at 15 diapers each day, or $6,241.50 for two years
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