1.19 x 10^57 atoms pack a lot of cleaning power

Bleach. HA!

Hot water. HA! HA!

Dryer? meh.

Check out the awesome atomic power of our own sun!
This is a cloth cotton diaper stained with poop. I washed it in cold water with 7th Generation liquid and some vinegar. This picture is post-wash just after I hung it up.


Then I hung it in the sun. Not even the direct sun. It was pretty overcast, but bright. Below is the result.


It hung out there for about 5 hours. During that five hours, I did other things while the atomic power of the sun did its thing. It's too bad my cell phone can't record smells because a line dried diaper should have its own cologne. Maybe I'll pitch it to J-Lo.

Save your money, save the planet. Line dry some stuff.

Unctuousness

Isn't that a great word. It means a lot of things, (like insincere) but it also means "oily."

Whippersnapper has developed a stubborn rash, and so we're trying on some different diaper creams. We used to use some olive oil based balm from a great place in the St. Lawrence river valley (which smells great and works very well on garden variety diaper rash. It also came in handy for use on cradle cap, various dry spots, and dad's hands and cuticles).

We used Burt's Bees Diaper Cream and some regular old petroleum jelly. In response to the rash, we've upped the ante, using the goo more liberally, and we also starting using Bordeaux's Butt Paste. I just did a load of diapers after adding to our arsenal, and for the first time, there was an unctuous (but very sincere) ring around the inside of our washer.

It doesn't look too bad, but if it persists, I might have to find a solution. My first response was to get an old rag and wipe away the ring of oily stuff from inside the washer before it got too thick.

I'll post again about whether this becomes a persistent problem and if I discover any cheap, friendly solutions to it.

Also, as soon as I find my adapter, I'm going to post the awesomest before/after photo of a lined dried diaper that will convince you that bleach and heavy detergent is totally useless compared to the awesome atomic power of the Sun.

How do you keep a fish from smelling?

...Cut off its nose...

The offspring will be four months old tomorrow. During his first month, he was very small, and we were a little under-prepped for cloth diapering. We didn't start until he was 1 month old.

In my last post, I exhorted the efficacy of cold-water washing. I remember now, I left out a point - I wash on cold, but I use the "heavy soil" cycle so the diapers really get agitated. (They calm down again before we use them.)

In the last few days, I've noticed the offspring developing a pretty strong urine smell when he pees even a little, and after the last cold/cold wash, I noticed that a general baby-diaper smell was starting to accumulate and not go away so much in the diapers after the wash.

Today, I threw everything in for a hot wash with a tiny amount of Borax to break down some of the odors and stains. I'll see if that doesn't help with the accumulating urine odor. Keep in mind, that this is a single hot wash after three months of use - and all the diapers and butt rags are in there.

If you're trying to save on water or energy, and you mix in a hot wash every now and then, think about other ways to save energy and water:

• Are all your toilets low-flow? If not, a new toilet is only about $100 and very simple to install. If you can change a bike tire and connect a garden hose to a sprinkler, you have the skills to replace your toilet.
• Do you have CFL bulbs in all commonly-used lamps?
• Got night lights? How about LED night lights instead?
• How about a low-flow shower head (appx 1.5 gallons per minute)? Mine has a shot-off valve on the shower head, and I turn it on the get wet and to rinse, and off to lather up. (TMI?) Anyway, it save a lot of water!
  

And so on. I'll let you know if the hot-wash does the trick on the urine smell, or if the kid is just developing an odor internally.

50 Million Tons of Thermoplastic Resin Later...

'How Bad For The Environment Can Throwing Away One Plastic Bottle Be?' 30 Million People Wonder

January 19, 2010 | Issue 46•03

A local resident discards a plastic bottle—just as he has done his whole life—with no perceivable effect on the environment.

WASHINGTON—Wishing to dispose of the empty plastic container, and failing to spot a recycling bin nearby, an estimated 30 million Americans asked themselves Monday how bad throwing away a single bottle of water could really be.

"It's fine, it's fine," thought Maine native Sheila Hodge, echoing the exact sentiments of Chicago-area resident Phillip Ragowski, recent Florida transplant Margaret Lowery, and Kansas City business owner Brian McMillan, as they tossed the polyethylene terephthalate object into an awaiting trash can. "It's just one bottle. And I'm usually pretty good about this sort of thing."

"Not a big deal," continued roughly one-tenth of the nation's population.

According to the inner monologue of millions upon millions of citizens, while not necessarily ideal, throwing away one empty bottle probably wouldn't make that much of a difference, and could even be forgiven, considering how long they had been carrying it around with them, the time that could be saved by just tossing it out right here, and the fact that they had bicycled to work once last July.

In addition, pretty much the entire states of Missouri and New Mexico calmly reassured themselves Monday that they definitely knew better than to do something like this, but admitted that hey, nobody is perfect, and at least they weren't still using those horrible aerosol cans, or just throwing garbage directly on the ground.

All agreed that disposing of what would eventually amount to 50 tons of thermoplastic polymer resin wasn't the end of the world.

"It's not like I don't care, because I do, and most of the time I don't even buy bottled water," thought Missouri school teacher Heather Delamere, the 450,000th caring and progressive individual to have done so that morning, and the 850,000th to have purchased the environmentally damaging vessel due to being thirsty, in a huge rush, and away from home. "It's really not worth beating myself up over."

"What's one little bottle in the grand scheme of things, you know?" added each and every single one of them.

Monday's plastic-bottle-related dilemma wasn't the only environmental quandary facing millions of citizens across the country. An estimated 20 million men and women wondered how wasteful leaving a single lightbulb on all night really was, while more than 40 million Americans asked themselves if anyone would actually notice if they just turned up the heat a few degrees instead of walking all the way downstairs and getting another blanket.

Likewise, had they not been so tired, and busy, and stressed, citizens making up the equivalent of three major metropolitan areas told reporters that they probably wouldn't have driven their minivans down to the corner store.

"Relax," thousands upon thousands of Americans quietly whispered to themselves as they tossed two articles of clothing into an empty washing machine and turned it on. "What are you so worried about?"

Running Hot and Cold

NOTE: At the moment of writing, the little bugger is 100% breastfed, which has a certain mitigating effect on the condition and odor of the waste product.

I did a lot of reading about what would get diapers clean. I read about rinsing in the toilet, I read about a hot rinse in the washer, then a full cycle of hot wash, hot rinse, I read some stuff about vinegar and Borax and other hippie-type cleaning agents.

Here's what I did.

First, I washed with hot, rinsed with hot. I used 7th Generation laundry soap. I read complaints somewhere about residue and reduced absorption, but I haven't seen it. I added 1 cup of vinegar to the wash cycle, and another cup into the fabric softener cup. I read about adding vinegar in the rinse to remove odors, and I was doing that with regular laundry anyway.

I thought what a drag to have to go down there and figure out when it was rinsing, so I studied the mechanism in the softener dispenser and discovered that it only came out during spin cycles, which would work fine.

I also added about 1/4 of Borax to the wash. Borax is bauxite. It's mined. It's not man-made, so the hippies dig it, but it's still not good to eat or put in your eye. Bauxite undergoes a mild reaction in water and generates some H2O2 - hydrogen peroxide - which is a very mild bleaching agent. Bauxite also has a tendency to leave behind some alkaloids in the fabric, which cause rash pretty effectively.

The bauxite, hot water combo makes your diapers pretty stain free - sans chlorine.

I wash the diapers on the "Small" load selection to conserve water.

I dried the diapers on hot. They came out fluffy and soft.

Then I read the British LCA on cloth "nappies" and found that the best way to lower the carbon footprint of your diapers was to hang them dry. Now I do that. They're a little crunchy, but nobody minds.

Then I started washing the diapers in hot and rinsing them in cold. I cut down on the amount of Borax to ease the rash. They still came out really clean and smelled pretty good.

I also tried reducing the wash load to "Extra Small" - but that wasn't enough rinse water to get the soap out of the diapers. Back to "Small."

I then tried cold wash cold rinse. Got rid of the Borax (still with the rash). Now the diapers have noticeably dark stains and a very subtle, but not unpleasant, odor when they come out of the wash. By the time they're dry, the odor is gone and they smell pretty much like nothing.

I don't rinse them at all before putting them in the wash. This may change when we introduce some solids. I'm looking forward to better weather, when the UV rays can bleach and odor-eliminate for me. I hear that works quite well.

A Rose by Any Other Name

How do you keep fish from smelling?

Cut off their noses.

How do you keep your diaper pail from smelling?

You don't. It has poop and pee in it. Keep the lid closed. Wash the contents every other day.

Don't waste your time washing the pail - just try to let it air out after the diapers go in the wash and before a new diaper gets in there. If it gets really gross, I guess you could wash it. I try to drop diapers into it in a way that doesn't spread the contents around.

I've read about the wet and dry methods. They both sound like a hassle.

The Drying Game

I'll write more about general cleaning later. Right now, I'd like to address a radical bit of information - a 2008 study by the UK Environmental Agency. If you go looking for information on the apparent benefit of cloth diapers, you'll find a lot of would-be-greenies shrugging and saying - "well, I guess it's a wash - may as well use disposable."

They actually say that - "it's a wash" - again and again and again. (For shame, Sierra Club). It's like Pampers paid for the slogan to be written.

Some people refer to a 2005 study by the UK EA, but they updated it in 2008. It contains this oft-overlooked nugget:

Combining three of the beneficial scenarios (washing nappies in a fuller load, outdoor line drying all of the time, and reusing nappies on a second child) would lower the global warming impact by 40 per cent from the baseline scenario, or some 200kg of carbon dioxide equivalents over the two and a half years, equal to driving a car approximately 1,000 km.

40% reduction in carbon dioxide. Geez. I guess if you actually try to save energy while using cloth, you might could. Go figure. If you're really into numbers, read this ass-stomping rebuttal dry, factual rebuttal (the link to the good one died...) of the 2005 UK EA study. Maybe that's why they re-did it.

I live in a climate even worse than the UK as far as line-drying clothes goes - so I tried the following experiment: I hung the diapers on a drying rack in the kitchen overnight. It worked fine. The diapers were really stiff and my wife complained - so I now throw them in the dryer on low for 20 minutes first. I could probably get away with 15 minutes.

Now the diapers are softer, and the electric drying time was reduced from 60 minutes to 20 and the temperature from medium to low. And if you think you'll run out of diapers waiting, or need to buy more: I have 24 diapers and I wash them about every other day.

What's really odd to me is that the trumpeters of the British Life Cycle Assessment seem to have hung out to dry any concerns about landfills. Landfills are nasty. They degrade groundwater, they smell, things in them don't biodegrade - contrary to popular opinion (take note biodegradable diaper users: personally, I don't care - just don't be suckered by the packaging).

The discussions about landfill environmental impact are hard to find, because it's just assumed that they are a very bad solution to long-term waste management. My feelings about it go like this: like landfill? Go ahead.

What's at stake is that with cloth, you have choices. You can choose to lower your impact. The decisions you make affect your ecology, your wallet, your shopping habits, and the amount of trash to the curb. If you use disposable, your ability to choose is far more limited.

Up next: A smell just as sweet.