FEATURED REVIEW: gDiapers on MomGoGreen.com

Back in March, I wrote about my experience at this year’s ExpoWest, and I said that I was “still sorting through my thoughts and notes on the show” at the time. Over four months later, that’s still the case.

One company I’ve been thinking about since the show is gDiapers. I don’t have kids, but even I could see the potential of a diaper like this. The diaper consists of an adorable little pant that’s lined for convenience, and there’s a little flushable liner inside made from wood fibers. When your baby poops, you can just throw out the flushable; it’s even compostable.

I asked a woman at the company’s booth at Expo about the issue of cost. After all, we’re all on a budget, and I’m imagining that those of you who have babies are especially conscious of continual costs like diapers. The woman said that, over the period of time a baby wears diapers, the cost of gDiapers will be about 30% more than a conventional brand like Huggies. She also said the cost was comparable to using Seventh Generation Chlorine Free diapers, which aren’t compostable. So, for the cost, it seems like using gDiapers is a better choice than using Seventh Generation diapers.

This is all stuff that I either remembered from the show or I found in my notes. But there’s a lot more to gDiapers, and so when I found a great post about them on MomGoGreen.com I was ecstatic. I’ve contacted the author of that blog, and I have her permission to re-post it here, giving her full credit, of course. You can read the original post, which includes a photo of the diapers. MomGoGreen is also on my sidebar, so check out this great blog. Enjoy the post!

My kids are no longer in diapers, but if they were I’d definitely give gDiapers a try. Admittedly, I am swayed by the adorable covers they offer, but I am sold on their environmental ingenuity. They call themselves the hybrid of diapers: not disposable, not cloth.

The Natural Resources Defense Council even says, “gDiapers seem to have the environmental edge over more conventional choices because they send no material to the landfill, use no elemental chlorine or plastics, and require much less washing (therefore, less water and energy usage) than regular cloth diapers.”

And to really vouch for their environmental considerations, gDiapers was the first consumer packaged product to receive prestigious ‘Cradle to Cradle’ Certification. (Cradle to Cradle is a must-read book by William McDonough and Michael Braungart). The certification supports what McDonough and Braungart call the “new industrial revolution,” a design paradigm that seeks to transform human industry through ecologically intelligent design. The gDiapers website says, “That means everything that goes into one of our flushables gets re-absorbed back into the eco-system in a neutral or beneficial way. So you are turning waste into a resource. At the same time, you are putting poop in the toilet, where it belongs, and avoiding the landfill issue all together.” As you can tell, that certification holds a lot of merit for me.

So how do these diapers work exactly? They have a flushable liner which snaps into adorable little “g-pants.” I’m sold just on the styling alone! They look so much more comfortable than a plastic diaper.

The gDiapers website has loads of really great information in a simple, easy to grasp style. Check out their page on the “great diaper debate” which compares disposables, cloth and flushables.

Here are some other facts from their site:

- gDiapers have no elemental chlorine, no perfumes, no smell, no garbage and no guilt. In fact, flushables are so gentle on the Earth you can even garden compost the wet ones in one compost cycle, approximately 50 – 150 days

- gDiapers are breathable. Plastic-free flushable refills keep babies dry and happy, so they’re less likely to get diaper rash

- Last year alone, 18-23 billion diapers went into landfills across America. That works out to be approximately 38,000 every minute and adds up to about 3.5 million tons of waste

- a disposable diaper can take up to 500 years to biodegrade in a landfill

I know there are other types of diaper alternatives out there, and I’ll write about them soon also. If you’ve used gDiapers please leave a comment and let me know what you think.