A term you may recall from your college economics class, opportunity costs, refers to those immeasurable, non-monetary costs – time, convenience, human energy, etc.- one should also consider in any kind of purchase. For instance, you may say it costs you $1.50/gallon to fill your gas tank, but it also costs you 5 minutes of time to stand in the cold (or heat), 5 minutes of extra driving to get to the gas station, the energy it takes to wash the gasoline smell off your hands, and the patience to endure Baby’s fussing during the whole event.

Therefore, when factoring the 'costs' involved, financial, environmental and health, one must also consider time, energy and convenience. Let's look at the opportunity costs involved in disposable diapering and cloth diapering.

Disposables
When it comes to diapering your baby, many would argue that disposables have the lowest opportunity costs – indeed, it’s in weighing these that the majority of today’s parents choose disposables. Certainly, it is easy to throw away a diaper and forget about it. But there are some opportunity costs of using disposables that should also be considered.

Leaking – I know people argue that cloth diapers leak while disposables don’t, but I have found the opposite to be true. Certainly, if left too long on a child, cloth diapers will wet through, but rarely do they leak. I have two boys, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been up in the middle of the night to change everything they were wearing and everything they were sleeping near – while they shivered and screamed because they were wet from a disposable diaper that leaked. I’m not sure if little girls have the same trouble, but something about the dry paper against which the boys are peeing and the lying-on-the-back position (or even on their sides) makes for big messes, at least with my guys. Because here’s the irony – everything around my baby will be soaking with pee, and yet the disposable diaper is completely dry. And not the kind of dry because the magic gels in it soaked up the urine, but the kind of dry because the pee somehow got past the diaper altogether and shot out to the jammies and the sheets. Here’s my theory: when they’ve gone to sleep in a dry disposable and then their little bladders fill up, they’ve got a lot to get out and when they go for it, it’s like peeing against a piece of cardboard – it just ricochets right off and goes elsewhere. I tried every name brand and off-brand out there and they’ve all done it. And I’ve talked with mothers of other little boys who’ve had the same trouble. My oldest only did this in the first few months, but my 17 month old still does it, on those rare occasions when we let him sleep in a disposable (we fool ourselves into thinking it’ll be okay and he’ll sleep better because he won’t be wet. . . . ). Why did I even use disposables in these situations? Because there’s a theory out there - that has some merit to it - that, even for day-time cloth users, night-time disposable use is a good idea since your baby will sleep longer and better because she won’t know she’s wet. But for about every four nights of good, dry sleep, we always seemed to have one night of misery and wetness.

With my second child, I had a C-section and I was going to give myself a few weeks to recover before I started using my cloth diapers. But after a few middle of the night flooding events, I decided I was ready to do the laundry again and get back to something a little more trustworthy – my cloth diapers.

Poops up the Back – Also known as a ‘blow out’.  I don’t know any parent of a newborn who hasn’t experienced this. Newborns just seem to have an incredible ability to shoot poops out their bottoms with an amazing velocity – projectile pooping is what we call it in our house. It’s especially fast and furious with breastfed baby poop. And with disposables on, babies seem capable of a most impressive feat: pooping UP. Yes, with those flat-backed disposables, there are frequent and mysterious episodes where your baby will be wearing poop all up his backside and on his clothes (and possibly yours), but there will be little or no poop inside the diaper. But not with cloth – the wraps and pull-up pants do a much better job at catching those messy poops than do the disposables. I had a couple of incidents where some newborn, runny poops leaked out the legs a bit, but it was nowhere near the mess I’d had with the disposables. And I’d much rather change a newborn’s pants than his shirt.

The Grocery Store – Now, for some of us, it’s a treat to go to the grocery store, especially when you get to go by yourself! But it is such a drag to have to run out late at night just to get another pack of diapers! If you send your husband out, he’s most likely to come home with just the diapers (at least mine is good about this). But if you’re like me, you’ll come home with diapers and about $50-100 worth of added groceries – usually things you weren’t planning on buying but that sounded good while you were out. So not only do you drop another $15-20 on diapers, you’ve just spent an additional wad of money. It always seemed that I spent 3 or 4 times the price of the already expensive diapers each time I went to buy more. With cloth diapers, you have what you need – already in your house. Yes you do need to wash them when the clean ones run out, but just push that button on your washer and it’s taken care of for you. And if you have a diaper service, fresh clean diapers are delivered to your door every week!

Cloth
How much of your time and energy does it ‘cost’ to use and wash cloth diapers? No one can calculate an answer to this with any sort of precision. But let’s consider a few things.

Diapering Time – Everyone has their own speed and style of diapering a baby. Some are quick and efficient, others are slow and painstakingly thorough. My husband had never changed a diaper in his life before our first child was born. He asked every nurse who came into our room during those three days at the hospital to teach him all they knew about changing a diaper. My husband is a thorough man, and he wants his babies’ bottoms CLEAN. And he’ll use a whole box of wipes if he needs to. It used to kill me to watch him change a diaper. He’s pretty quick now, though he still needs quite an arsenal of wiping material to get the job done to his satisfaction. My point? We all develop our style and speed of diapering. It takes me just as much time to change a baby with a cloth as it does a disposable – I do the same things, just with different materials. And, once you get used to cloth, it will be just as fast for you to use a cloth as it would be to use a disposable.

Diapering Frequency – Whether you use cloth or disposable, you should change your baby’s diaper every 2-3 hours. The reality is, however, that most cloth diaperers do change their baby’s diapers more frequently than disposable diaperers. For the health of your child, you shouldn’t leave him in a disposable for more extended periods of time. Even though those famous gels in disposables will absorb the urine your child excretes, the urine is still there and is still able to cause rashes. So, if we’re talking parenting tendencies, using disposable diapers may mean fewer diaper changes. But if we’re talking about your baby’s best health, there should be no difference in diapering frequency between cloth and disposable.

Diaper to Pail Time – It takes just about as much time to take a wet cloth diaper to your dry pail, wet pail or washer as it does to throw a disposable in the trash. For a poopy diaper, the issue gets a little more complicated. A little known fact about disposables is that the directions on the package say to deposit fecal matter into the toilet before you dispose of the diaper. It is technically illegal to dispose of human waste in residential garbage. I know many disposable diapering parents who, after cleaning baby and putting a fresh diaper on her, carry the poopy diaper into the kitchen or laundry room (I’ve only met one person who ever dumped the poop out into the toilet, by the way), open a cupboard and pull out a plastic grocery bag, wrap up the diaper, tie it in a knot, carry it outside to the garage or back porch, and throw it in a garbage can. This takes about 1-2 minutes to get the poopy diaper disposed of. Some parents are quick and just throw the diaper in the nearest bathroom or kitchen garbage can and take it out later (and enjoy the smells of it until then). Others use the environmental nightmare that is the Diaper-You-Know-What, and twist the poopy diaper up into a little ball on the string of sausage link diapers for later disposal. This is a quick disposal, we must admit, though we cringe at the double duty against the environment that this device poses.

 For a poopy cloth diaper, gone are the days of swishing and twirling it in the toilet ‘til all visible signs of poop have been flushed. Washing machines are pretty amazing these days and can handle quite a lot of, well, poop. In our Easy Wash system, we recommend shaking off what poop you can over the toilet and then putting the diaper in your pail without even getting it wet. If you really want to dunk it a few times, it will take you about one minute to get the poop off and get the diaper into the pail. Then perhaps another 30 seconds to wash your hands – but even if you just threw a poopy disposable in the trash, you should take the same amount of time to wash your hands. So, depending on your methods, you could spend just as much time disposing of a paper diaper as you would getting your cloth diaper into a pail.

Laundry Time – In our cost-analysis section, we’ve given you an estimation of how much water, detergent and energy your machines will use to wash diapers for 2 1/2 years. But what about the personal time and energy you would invest to get those diapers clean? That’s a fair question. If you live in an apartment and have to haul your diapers to a laundromat - or at least to your basement laundry room of your apartment building - and use coin operated machines, the opportunity costs of using cloth diapers will definitely be higher than those with home-laundering capabilities. If this is you and you would still like to try cloth, we have some suggestions in our washing instructions section to help you minimize the time and money spent at a laundromat.

If you use a diaper service, you don’t have to wash diapers at all. You don’t even have to do anything with the poopies – they’ll handle it all. You do need to wash your diaper covers at home, but you can just do a small load a couple times a week, or throw them in with your other laundry – just be sure to follow care instructions properly.

For home-laundered diapers, there is some time involved in washing and drying a load of diapers. But, if you follow our Easy Wash instructions, your washer and dryer do nearly all the work. You can fold your diapers if you like, which is nice and keeps things organized, but it will take up some of your time. Or you can just keep your clean diapers and cloth wipes in a basket next to your changing table and grab what you need when you need it. When it comes to having a baby, you’ll be doing a lot more laundry anyway, so adding two more loads each week is really just another drop in the proverbial bucket.

The Gross Factor – Okay, let’s be honest: poops and pees can stink – especially if left to sit in a bucket or soak in a washer for a day or two. And if you commit yourself to the diaper dunking routine (which we don’t recommend) you may have a few gross moments each day. Nobody’s going to argue with you: babies can dish out some pretty nasty diapers. Perhaps that’s what can be so enticing about disposables – you get to throw the wretched thing away and not have to deal with it anymore! But here’s one of the most beautiful things about cloth diapers – with just a little bit of time, baking soda, and detergent, even the nastiest, most outrageously stinky diaper comes clean! I actually find laundry a necessary drudgery, but I love to wash my diapers! I love to hold them to my nose and rub my face in them. I drink in their fresh, clean scent and revel in the fact that a wonderful transformation has just occurred. So I say bring on the gross diapers – I love to be a part of a process that turns dirty into clean, unwanted into beloved.

Pure aesthetics: Let's be honest- what would YOU rather wear on YOUR bottom, cotton or a papery plastic? If you've ever had the misfortune of having to wear "disposable undergarments" for whatever reason, you'll have compassion on your little ones and the mushy, gusy disposable mess they carry around between their legs. Ladies, how do you like the feel of disposable menstrual pads against your delicate parts? Not your favorite, is it? Don't we all prefer our soft, cotton panties against our skin? Dads- don't you prefer high quality cotton (or silk!) briefs or boxers, as opposed to the poly-blend, cheap-o variety? Cloth diapers are natural, soft and lovely against the skin. Even if you weigh it out and find the opportunity costs for you are a little higher to use cloth, consider what your baby might rather have against his tender skin for his first years of like- just in terms of pure comfort.

We hope our reflections on opportunity costs as we see them are helpful to you as you weigh out the costs of cloth versus disposable diapers. It is very important to weigh all your (and your baby's) costs when choosing a diapering plan for your family.