Beyond Cloth Diapers - Green Toileting For Adults

For people out there that have never used cloth diapers this may come as a real shock, but for those that have, you probably have either seen or used cloth baby wipes. You use them, toss them in your diaper pail or wet bag and then run them through the wash. Wallypop takes it to the next logical step. In addition to selling reasonable priced cloth napkins, hankies, menstrual pads, cloth shopping bags, breast pads, diapers and baby slings, the staple products of many home operated natural living sites, Wallypop offers cloth family wipes (toilet paper) and asks the question if it's good enough for your baby, isn't it good enough for you? I'd think any user of cloth infant products would feel the same way. For those of us with no children, I admit it can be a bit of a leap, especially for #2, but the average toilet visit is not a #2 visit, and most of the toilet paper women use is for urine, which is sterile and generally does not have much of an odor. Not to mention if you "let it mellow" which is an excellent water saving practice, you know that the biggest problem is the collection of toilet paper you get in the bowl. Once you eliminate the toilet paper flushes you will find you save a lot more water, especially if there are a number of women in your household.

I took a look at some of my feminine products - cloth pads, sea sponges - all much grosser than a cloth with a little pee on it. I thought about how many recycled paper towels I have thrown away because one of my dogs had an accident or my female was in heat. I wipe that up with a cloth, so I finally got up the guts to order some of the soft flannel wipes (they are also available in hemp and sherpa). They are very thick and similar in size and weight to a pot holder. They are much softer than many brands of toilet paper and I never have to worry about soaking through or tearing. Granted, there are brands of regular toilet paper that are very thick and absorbant, but they use a lot of paper to get that thickness, don't have as much to a roll and are therefore not very eco-friendly. All right - I still haven't gotten there for a #2 visit and my husband doesn't use them at all due to the obvious biological differences. For now, I set the wipe bag along with the Seventh Generation toilet paper and Natracare organic wipes and everyone is happy.

So where do you store a soiled cloth wipe? I like the wet bags people use for diapers, also available at a reasonable price from Wallypop for the upstairs bathroom, and I toss the ones from the downstairs bathroom right in the soaking container I keep for my menstrual pads. Since I pre-clean them with Bio-Kleen oxygen bleach and Bac-Out, I can launder them in a mesh bag like pantyhose or menstrual pads. If you still can't stand the thought of washing them with other clothes, use a hand washer or a low cycle with just the wipes and any pads you may need to clean. Ultimately, you will save a lot of money on yet another product that you flush away (and if you use toilet paper to wipe your nose, you can always buy some soft cloth hankies to take its place).

Another unique product Wallypop sells is their cloth sandwich baggies and wraps. Since there is no way to make plastic bags and wrap eco-friendly, these products are really important and I'm shocked that I haven't seen them elsewhere. There are alternate products like this natural waxed paper or these PVC and plasticizer free plastic bags that are better for you by eliminating harmful chemicals, but at the end of the day you still have plastic or paper being consumed and discarded. Even these compostable food storage products consume resources and create manufacturing waste. I'm not saying reusable cloth products will ever replace plastic bags completely - for long term storage you still have to have something airtight, but if you pack a sandwich for work or school or want to carry some cookies or crackers along in the car (and don't want to waste money and resources and generate waste by purchasing single serve packets), washable and reusable bags and wrappers that last for years and don't generate waste are the way to go.

Finally, for those reading this thinking how strange it is that I use and recommend so many cloth products, how gross it is to deal with food scraps, snot, pee and blood and/or how much time it must take in maintenance, remember that the concept of disposable items, unnecessary packaging, and single use items is largely a mid 1800's to present concept, and one that has done our species, our planet and the other species forced to share the planet with us nothing but harm. For the millions of years that humans have existed before the 1900's people tried to conserve and reuse products because most everything was made by hand until the mid 1800's and later. Check out this history of trash to see how little a problem trash was in the past, and how as we urbanized and began buying packaged and single use products rather than using natural, reusable products the problem with trash disposal became a global crisis.

An interesting point is that the invention of synthetic plastic in 1868 seemed to begin a new age of trash dumping. What initially was a fairly stable trash problem consisting largley of organic matter like sewage, food and dead animals began to increase rapidly as people began to produce more household waste consisting of manufactured items. This lead to new "solutions" like incinerators (1874) and the development of recycling centers (1897), but failed to address the increasing amounts of refuse. In 1900 the average person produced up to 1400 lb of trash per year, by 1916 that increased to up to 1750 lb per year and it remains close to that figure to this day. That is 10 times the body weight of the average person in trash every year times everyone in the country and the population is increasing - way grosser than handling your own bodily fluids.

Next time you carry your trash to the curb, look at how much is in the can for the week. Is it one bag? Two? Are you one of the families that has two or more cans full over the brim with trash? For my family, my goal is to put at most one full bag of trash out per week. I'm not counting recycling here, just the trash. If it is more than that, I try to figure out what is in there and what can be replaced with reusable products or eliminated because I don't want to see the day where we have generated so much waste that even burning and burying it doesn't work anymore.