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How do you manage a long car trip with cloth diapers!?!?!
So far, I haven't had problems around town but I chickened out when faced with a 3 hour car trip and over-night stay away from home! Our daughter is a VERY heavy wetter, after all!
I DID try to stay more enviromentally aware when finding "disposibles". I got diapers from Nature Boy & Girl. They are bio-degradable and I found the same type of bags to put them in. After all, putting them in plastic BAGS would defeat the purpose of all my careful shopping!
I still feel guilty about being such a chicken though. Has anyone done this, and if so, HOW do you do it without a huge production and a trip to some strange *shiver* LAUNDERMAT !!! |
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Not to increase your guilt or anything but those biodegradable diapers are no better than regular disposables unless you're somehow composting them (which many can't even be home except in industrial composting). Even with biodegradable bags they're still going in an anearobic environment (no oxygen) so they simply cannot degrade. Nothing degrades well in landfills. There's a chance that the biodegradable bags/diapers will degrade slightly better than regular plastic but not significantly.
Unless you're gone for more than 3-4 days (or have a very small stash) you shouldn't need to deal with a laundromat at all. Just get some kind of bag to store the diapers (unless you have room in the car/van for a pail) and you're good to go.
I'd recommend one large wet bag for pee diapers and a bunch of small plastic bags for poopy diapers. If you can and want to, you can rinse poopy diapers in hotel bathrooms but you don't have to. Disposable or fleece liners would be helpful in this situation so you can just flush the liner and poop away. But at worst you can just put the poopy diapers in individual plastic bags and deal with them at home. Sounds kinda yucky but really it's no worse than dealing with 'fresh' diapers at home and many even find it easier to deal with 'older' poop.
If your nighttime diapers tend to make the pail really stinky you can always opt for disposables at night.
As for times in the car when you can't change as often as you would at home, just treat it like a nighttime diaper. Add liners for absorbency and perhaps a stay-dry barrier (fleece) for skin protection.
Another alternative that's interesting are the new hybrid diapers. Like Flips or Gdiapers. The 'insert' is like a giant maxi pad that you can flush (well the Gs are flushable anyway, not sure about the flips). But they're totally plastic free and much more compostable than 'eco' disposables (if you're really devoted you could bring them home to compost). You don't necessarily need to invest in special covers for them if you don't want to. Anything that would hold a prefold in place (velcro wrap or pocket diaper with fleece inside to prevent shifting) will hold the insert in place. You can also use them inside an ME diaper as a super absorbent and super dry doubler (for nighttime or long trips in the car). They give you absorbency and dryness similar to a disposable but in a much more eco-friendly way plus you still have the superior reliability of a cloth diaper.
Oh and one tip if you do use regular or 'eco' disposables, try putting a cloth diaper cover on top. This will help prevent poopy blowouts. In desperate times (when I needed something for nighttime that was totally odorless and totally dry while not wanting to risk leaks) I've even used a whole cloth diaper *and* cover over top of a disposable.
That's about all I can think of... Anyone else?? Oh, I just wanted to add that if guilt over disposables was all you had to deal with then count yourself lucky. I'll never forget our 1st road trip as parents (with our then 9 month old dd). She still had lots of explosive poops that were well contained with cloth diapers but not so with disposables. We thought disposables would be easier, especially since we'd be gone for almost 2 weeks. Hah!! I'll tell you I'd much rather deal with strange laundromats than what I dealt with using disposables. She would have at least 1-3 poopy blowouts every single day! It was late summer and we were near the ocean so we mostly brought warmer clothes but of course we ran into a heat wave so all we wore was the summer clothes that we had precious few of. So I was constantly washing poopy outfits (sometimes my own because she did it in my lap!!) in motel sinks every single night! And on at least two occasions I was trying to wash a poopy convertible car seat (so not the infant buckets with easy to remove covers) in a motel bathtub!!! Not fun believe me!
Karen. |
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The diapers I picked say they are cornstarch based so the bugs LOVE them and I found bags that said the same(in the pet store! lol). I use G-diapers with flat folds as the inserts right now...since I'm having issues with my one-size diapers...maybe I'll try their liners next trip.
But NO, guilt wasn't the only problem I had...but that was my husbands fault and he'll be MUCH more careful next time, I'm sure! He didn't SPRAY the portable grill LIKE I TOLD HIM TO!!! So the backseat of the car was infested with spiders by the next morning & we didn't notice until our sweet little 2 month old (at the time) daughter started to SCREAM bloody murder! She had been bitten on the face and the back by spiders!!! Since I am highly allergic to spiders, for some weird reason, I FREAKED OUT big time!!!
We had to leave the car sitting for the rest of the trip, which was boring since we couldn't GO anywhere, because we had to bomb it then air it out, then...because I'm paranoid by now...spray every single thing AND the car and air it all out, again! I even made him open and go through EVERY SINGLE DIAPER and go through the baby bag with a fine-toothed comb before I would allow my baby to be changed...since we obviously couldn't spray them!!! |
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Ick, spiders!
I'm with Karen, in that for our first trip (bus, plane, train, car) we decided that disposables would be easier. Never, ever, ever again. After that I would use disposables only for the travelling part, as that took too long to be able to carry enough diapers. I agree that up to three or four days, I'd just keep the dirties in a pail (probably wrapping the poopy ones in bags if I couldn't deal with them) and deal with them at home. I just found my ME to be so much more reliable, especially for BF explosive poops, that it was worth carrying a suitcase of diapers. So much better not to be scraping off the stroller seat in the teeny changing corner of some railway station . . . |
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Yes, I'm familiar with corn based plastics and unfortunetly they just don't decompose well in landfills. There are no bugs or bacteria in landfills (because there's no oxygen) so nothing to decompose the corn. You can even email the companies themselves and they'll tell you the same thing, nothing readily decomposes in a landfill. I've researched eco-disposables a fair bit and although they sound great in theory, the reality just isn't the same. They're actually a bit of a pet peeve of mine because I feel many people are being misled by them.
Wow, yeah a spider infestation would be a problem. I've made peace with spiders (and many other bugs) in the last few years so they don't generally freak me out like they used to. But an infestation in my car and them bitting my baby would freak me out big time too!!
Karen. |
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| I've done several road trips with cloth. Our cabin is a 10h drive so I just put all the dirty dipes into my handy ME wetbag. We stop every few hours and I change his bum in the vehicle. Luckily at the cabin, there is a washer for me to wash the dipes. |
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| My husband got a KICK out of the theory of "no bugs" in landfills...he wants to know where YOUR landfill is because he'd rather go THERE then ours. He goes to them all the time for his job and he said there's plenty of bugs, birds, and nice big rats, at our local landfills! LOL He DID say that he doubts highly that it's oxygen that you're breathing while you're there! I'm glad, sometimes, that their insurance says I'm not allowed to travel with him. YUCK! |
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At the surface yes he's probably right that there's tons of those things. There's plenty of oxygen at the surface. But garbage gets buried by other garbage rather quickly, it doesn't sit at the surface for very long. And then once the landfill is shut down it's totally buried under several fee of dirt. So no, I'm sorry but there really is no oxygen or bacteria in landfills.
Article about landfills & biodegradable items:
http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.htm
Article about bio-plastics in general (Note how they say you need industrial composting to break these down. They also quickly skim over other issues with bio-plastics):
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2008-12-25-biodegradable-plastic_N.htm
Another article about bio-plastics and how they're not all they're hyped up to be:
http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/05/do-biodegradable-plastics-really-work
More bio-plastic info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradable_plastic
"...certified biodegradable plastics require a specific environment of moisture and oxygen to biodegrade, conditions found in professionally managed composting facilities"
I really wish bio-plastics were as great as their hype would make consumers believe but they're just not. That's not to say that they can't have some place in environmental solutions, perhaps they will someday (for example hopefully in the future most people will have access to industrial compost facilities). But for now they're mostly hype with little substance.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm not criticizing your choice to use these diapers. If travelling with cloth just doesn't work for you then by all means. If nothing else these diapers are often a little healthier (less dyes & perfumes) and you're helping support a smaller company that is at least trying to do something positive. Although I don't believe they're succeeding much right now, trying IS an important first step. I just want people to have all the right info. I would hate for someone to stretch their budget to pay for more expensive diapers thinking they're doing something great for the environment, only to find out later that it was all hype.
Karen. |
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