by Beth Gray

Babies are cute and snuggly and just the sight of a baby can bring a smile to most peoples’ faces.  Babies are also expensive and create tremendous volumes of waste as any parent will tell you.  By one estimate, “over his/her lifetime, each American born in the 1990s will produce an average of 3.1 million pounds of CO2,” the equivalent of 413 plane trips from New York to Tokyo.  American children in particular tend to have a greater impact on the environment than other children around the world.  For example, “one American child generates as much CO2 as 106 Haitian kids.”  There are several ways to reduce the impact your bundle of joy will have on the planet, however.

New parents quickly get the hang of diapering their baby perhaps because they do it so often.  Ninety-six percent of American babies wear disposable diapers while only six percent of Chinese and only two percent of Indian babies wear them.  It takes a disposable diaper 550 years to decompose, a staggering length of time especially when one considers the number of diapers that the average child goes through in a lifetime.  Aside from the dramatic impact on the environment that disposable diapers cause, they are expensive.  For a relatively simple and effective step toward greening your baby, try switching to cloth, reusable diapers.  While they are obviously not as “user friendly” as disposable diapers and take considerably more effort and clean up on the part of mom and dad, you can save a small fortune while helping alleviate some of the strain disposable diapers put on the environment. 

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