When it comes to diapers, I'll admit it: I'm lazy. Everyone has their limits, and in my quest to raise Hayden as green as possible, this is definitely where I hit a wall. Everyone from the upstairs neighbors to my mom just assumed that I'd be using cloth diapers for our baby, and were surprised to learn that I'd be using disposables. But I have my reasons, and laziness is admittedly the biggest of them.

When it comes to our household products, David and I are religious in our use of eco-friendly products [1], which includes never using bleach [2]. Ever. Not even when I was in culinary school, where keeping your "whites" clean counted toward your grade and my uniform could best be described as off-white. I stood my ground on principle.

This obstinacy ruled out the path of least resistance from the get-go, since diapering services rely on bleach. Which meant that if I wanted to go the cloth route [3], I'd have to clean them myself. Conveniently for some, this is the most energy-efficient and eco-friendly route anyway. But inconveniently for me, we happen to live in a third-floor walk-up and have to share the building's lone washer-dryer with three other tenants — one of whom just happens to be a family of four. A family of four, in case you don't already know, happens to have a mind-boggling amount of laundry.

Well before Hayden was even a glimmer in our eye, David and I (and everyone else in the building) were locked in a never-ending struggle with this family for use of the machines. The thought of adding Hayden's laundry to our load was daunting enough, but adding heaps of cloth diapers was downright exhausting. I threw in the towel before she was ever born. Hayden's heiney is now happily ensconced in Seventh Generation's chlorine-free diapers [4], which may not be quite as conscientious a choice as cloth, but is a compromise that I can live with. Literally.

Resources

• A Tale of Two Diapers [5]
• Why Cloth? [6]