This is going to be a long one...

I originally posted this on a different website, and it didn't seem to go over too well with the locals...I ended up deleting it from that website, but I'm still excited about so I thought I'd share here where I know the people that read this will be excited for us as well.

So...the Johnson family has been recycling, composting, buying organic, and trying to buy glass instead of plastic for sometime now. Just trying to do our part to better/take care of the environment.

Yesterday we made the decision to change our diaper situation. The Johnson family is going cloth. We purchased our cloth diapers, flannel wipes, and covers. The initial cost is a pretty penny, but will save us money in the long run. We spend about 60$ just in diapers a month since we have 2 kids in diapers, and thats not including wipes. If it were just the diapers we were replacing, it would pay itself off in 4 months, but we are even phasing out our disposable wipes, therefore the cost will make up for itself sooner.

Here are a few calculations that I came up with as well...

5 diapers per day for one week = 35 diapers
(more diapers a day when newborn)
52 weeks in a year = 1820 diapers
2 years = 3640 diapers
(not all children potty train at 2 (Ivy hasn't))
So take that number (3640) multiplied by however many children (5 in my case) = 18200 diapers

Thats a lot of diapers. And at $20 a box with only 92 in each = $3956.52 just in diapers, not including wipes! I think I'll go with the $250 we spent on diapers, covers and wipes...and do a little extra work. :)

I found a website from March of 2004...
"Over 20 billion disposable diapers are sent to landfills each year. (1) This is enough diapers to cover a football field 3 miles deep."
And that was in 2004!!

These were taken from a different website

"No one knows how long it takes for a disposable diaper to decompose, but it is estimated to be about 250-500 years, long after your children, grandchildren and great, great, great grandchildren will be gone.

Disposable diapers contain traces of Dioxin, an extremely toxic by-product of the paper-bleaching process. It is a carcinogenic chemical, listed by the EPA as the most toxic of all cancer-linked chemicals. It is banned in most countries, but not the U.S..

Disposable diapers contain Tributyl-tin (TBT) - a toxic pollutant known to cause hormonal problems in humans and animals.

Disposable diapers contain sodium polyacrylate, a type of super absorbent polymer (SAP), which becomes a gel-like substance when wet. A similar substance had been used in super-absorbency tampons until the early 1980s when it was revealed that the material increased the risk of toxic shock syndrome.

MORE INFO
My mother's, mothers, sister's, daughter's husband (hee hee I love long genealogy descriptions. Basically my 1st cousin once removed's husband) posted information that I also found very interesting. Some of it I already knew, but there was a lot of interesting new stuff I learned. Here's the info...

PAPER:
· We can save more space in our landfills by recycling paper products than any other materials and each piece of paper can be recycled up to five times before the fibers become too weak .
· 44 million newspapers are thrown away every day in the United States. This is like throwing 500 000 trees into a landfill each week.
· Each ton of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil and 7000 gallons of water!
· If each person were to reuse a paper shopping bag for just one trip to the store, we would save 60 000 trees. Imagine how many trees would be saved if we all used reusable cloth grocery bags instead!

ALUMINUM:
· It takes about 95% less energy to make aluminum from recycled aluminum than to make it from raw materials.
· Recycling a single aluminum can saves enough energy to power your television for three hours or to run a 100-watt light bulb for almost four hours. Imagine how much energy you alone could save if you recycled every aluminum can you used in a year!
· Aluminium dumped into our landfills today will remain there for over 200 years.

PLASTICS:
· Plastic bags made from recycled polythene rather than virgin materials save two thirds of the energy required for production and reduce the water used by almost 90%.
· It is still difficult to recycle plastic containers and make them into new containers for food and beverages because the separation process for the various different types and colors of plastics is labor intensive and not cost efficient. The best option is to reduce plastic wastes by purchasing items that have less packaging.
· Recycling is still important however, because there are many items that can be made from recycled plastics. These items include garbage cans, picnic tables, fiber-fill for vests and jackets, traffic cones and many others. Purchasing items such as these that are made from recycled materials will help to further support this industry.

GLASS:
· Glass is 100% recyclable and can go from the recycling bin to a store shelf in as little as 30 days!
· Approximately 80% of recycled glass containers are made into new glass bottles and glass can be reused an infinite number of times.
· Recycling one ton of glass saves the equivalent of nine gallons of fuel oil and one sixth of a ton of carbon dioxide!
· Making a glass container from a recycled container creates about 20% less air pollution, 50% less water pollution and uses only about half the energy of making it from virgin materials. Recycling a single glass bottle can save enough energy to light a 100-watt light bulb for 4 hours!

FOOD:
· Yard trimmings and food wastes make up approximately 23% of municipal solid waste in the United States.
· This type of waste is biodegradable but often these food items sit in landfills for long periods of time unable to be broken down through the plastic garbage bags they are stored in. We could keep many of these items out of our landfills and allow them to be broken down naturally by composting.
· Composting enriches and regenerates poor soils which can also provide many other environmental benefits such as helping to suppress plant diseases, reducing or eliminating the need for chemical fertilizers, promoting higher crop yields, and facilitating the restoration of forests, wetlands and other important habitats.

BATTERIES:
· Batteries contain heavy metals such as mercury, nickel, lead and cadmium, which can leak into the ground and contaminate the environment if improperly disposed of.
· Cadmium can be toxic to aquatic invertebrates and can bioaccumulate in fish. This will in turn build up in animals which feed on fish such as humans and terrestrial or marine mammals.
· Contact the battery manufacturer, the appliance manufacturer or your local council to find out how to properly dispose of batteries in your area or better yet use appliances that derive power from other sources such as the sun whenever possible.
· Another good option for appliances that require batteries is to use rechargeable ones. Each rechargeable battery may substitute for hundreds of single use batteries. Imagine the heavy metals we could keep out of our landfills if we all switched to rechargeable.


Although many of the materials that we use on a daily basis are recyclable, there are some products that cannot be recycled or that the process is too inefficient to make it worthwhile. By avoiding the use of these products whenever possible, we can help promote the use of more environmentally responsible products in their place.

STYROFOAM:
· Recycling of Styrofoam is difficult and the technology for it is not nearly as advanced as for many other products such as paper.
· Each year Americans throw away 25 trillion Styrofoam cups. This is enough to circle the earth 436 times. Imagine how much Styrofoam we could keep out of our environment if we all carried travel mugs to use when purchasing hot beverages.
· Harmful chemicals are released into the atmosphere during the production of Styrofoam. These chemicals have been shown to degrade the Earth’s ozone layer.
· Styrofoam is also a popular product for packaging up leftover food in restaurants so that customers can take it home. Next time you go out for dinner remember to bring your own Tupperware so you can bring your leftovers home without adding to the Styrofoam in our landfills.

WAXED CARDBOARD: (I'm not sure what waxed cardboard is)
· Waxed cardboard cannot be recycled. It can only be recycled as mixed paper and many recycling plants will not even accept it meaning that it will end up in the trash.
· Waxed cardboard can however be reused so if you cannot avoid using it altogether try to think of alternative uses when you are finished with it.

http://www3.telus.net/public/a6h4z2/recycling.htm

I hope this has been interesting as well as informative for you as it was for me.

We are still waiting on our cloth diapers....sat by the window today (Monday) waiting for the mailman to come, thinking today would be the day....then we realized it was President's Day...lol So hopefully they will come tomorrow.