gDiapers

Thanks to a suggestion from some friends, we've made a mini-revolution of diapering in our family! They're called gDiapers, and they're.....wait for it..... flushable!!! No more stinky poopy diapers in our trash cans, and no more filling up landfills with disposable diapers that will take at least 500 years to decompose! Apparently, conventional disposable diapers are the third largest contributors to landfills in the world and yet only five percent of the world's population uses them. Even though we were only using 30-40 disposable diapers per month (because we use cloth diapers during the day), that was still at least 360-400 diapers we as a family put out there in the last year alone. And to think that most diapering families use on average 2500 disposable diapers a year!

At any rate, after much consideration and research, we decided that the best thing for our family was to switch to gDiapers for at night and while travelling. And they really work well! They're kind of a hybrid between our cloth diapering technique and regular disposable diapers. They have cloth covers (gPants) with velcro fasteners, water-proof polyester snap-in liners, and environmentally-safe "pads" that get pressed into the liners, which are then either flushed or composted when dirty or wet. We've even been able to switch from using pins and plastic pants with our cloth diapers to using the gPants with a cloth liner instead of the flushable liner. This also makes potty training much easier since we can much more easily take off Ian's cloth diaper right at the toilet, without having to mess with pins and whatnot.
We've been fairly happy with the results, too. The gDiapers are really an ingenius invention that could possibly change diapering as we know it. They certainly changed our lives, and in the process, also made us more aware of our waste in general. I was reading in the book of Genesis some time ago, and in chapter 2, verse 15, it says, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." In the original Hebrew language, "work" has more of a meaning of "serve" and "take care" has more of a meaning of "protect." Adam's first job was to serve and protect the land that God gave him! How does this not apply to us, as well? This earth is a gift from God, and we are responsible for serving and protecting it as best as we are able. Therefore, we've become really convicted in this area about making sure we're not polluting the land with our trash, and have stepped up our recycling habits. Our next step will be working on a good compositing system so we can throw away even less waste. It's all a process, and I'm sure God has more steps to take us through!