Thursday, December 02, 2010

For me to poop on!

Cloth diaperers are crazy.

You'd think that people who use cloth diapers would be into saving money.  By and large, you'd be wrong.  From what I have seen, there are a lot of women out there who think nothing of spending $20 on one diaper or $60 on a pair of longies (wool pants worn over cloth diapers).  And, nearly to a person, they turn their noses up at the cheap Gerber diapers.

Seriously, in one thread on the subject at DiaperSwappers, the single-most-common answer to the question of "How much did you spend on your diaper stash?" was >$1,000.  A lot of women proudly said that they had spent a couple thousand dollars.  (Thankfully, most of those had also made back a lot of money by selling the diapers.)

All of this for something which, fundamentally, is for your infant to crap and pee on.  Let's not overstate things here.  A thousand dollars for shit catchers is...

Well, honestly I'm fine with people spending their money however they want.  Someone said buying diapers was her hobby.  As a hobby, I guess it's no worse than shooting the hell out of a piece of paper. 

But this other part of me thinks there's probably a fundamental contradiction between spending a thousand bucks or more on diapers and the eco-friendliness they claim is the real reason they cloth diaper.  See, there seems to be this huge blind spot Greenies have: use of resources to create the latest "green" product of choice. 

Pay $20 for a diaper made in China and you'd have to ignore that country's abhorrent environmental record, all the resource costs of shipping it to you...and the further stress put on the environment by a ridiculous wash routine that includes (I am not making this up) a prewash, wash cycle or two, and multiple rinse cycles--all with hot water.  There's a greater cost than just what you pull from your husband's wallet.

2 comments:

the pistolero said...

A thousand dollars for shit catchers is...

Bat-shit crazy. As for Greenies and their blind spot: how about those electric cars sucking up all that coal-fired electricity? And in conjunction with the tax on such? Viability FAIL.

Albatross said...

Or how about the corn farm that was turned into a solar farm that can provide power for 0.45% of households in San Antonio?

Because that's what we need: less food.