Feelings: mixed

I was very excited to try this product, which is sort of a hybrid between cloth and disposable diapers. They have three parts: outer cloth cover, inner liner, and an absorbent flushable insert. We’re trying to be more considerate of the amount of waste we produce and this looked like a good way to put a little less into the landfills. At the same time, we are very frugal, so monetary costs are also important. Here is my gDiaper experience…

We found the starter kit at our local Mother Earth store, even though it wasn’t listed on gdiapers.com. I ripped it open and was fascinated by the parts and liked the look of the diapers. Soft and cute.

For the first week or so, we didn’t use them because I kept meaning to do laundry but never got around to it. So they sat in the corner for a while as I used the disposables we got from the hospital. Poor excuse, I know.

Finally we washed them and let them air dry. Putting them on the baby was easy. They did seem to be more comfortable and soft for him. However, after reading through the website I was expecting to get a few uses out of the outer cloth part before having to wash it again. This was rarely the case. We only had two diapers, so after maybe 2 uses of the first one and 1 use of the second one, that was it until the next laundry day.

Because I only like to do laundry every 5-7 days (I mean that’s when I end up doing it, not that it’s more fun on those days), I tried hand washing and air drying the things. Unfortunately, because they are such a nice soft material, they seemed to take FOREVER to dry after hand washing. A few days hanging in our bathroom. That was disappointing. Washing by hand isn’t fun. Watching the things hang in your house for days as they dry is also annoying. (Yes, I could dry them outside, but I’m an avid indoorsman…The black widow we found outside the other day hasn’t helped matters any.) Back to the drawing board of waiting until laundry day.

I really wanted these things to work, so I kept trying harder to make sure I put them on right. The inside liner part is supposed to go along the baby’s creases, so I made sure I did that. I tried to change them frequently. Still, most of the time it was 1 use, and just one time I got 3 uses out of a cloth cover.

One day I was able to get 2 uses out of diaper #1 and 3 uses out of diaper #2. “This isn’t so bad,” I thought. I had accumulated 5 bloated flushable parts in my diaper pail and they were ready to be flushed. I was actually looking forward to this part.

Well, I got myself in big trouble this time. I followed the instructions of ripping both sides, letting the saturated material fall, swishing it around with the stick, then flushing. I think I even gave my toilet 2 flushes per insert. About halfway through this process, my toilet overflowed. And I’m not just talking about the thing where you see the water rising but it doesn’t go all the way. I’m talking about a real overflow where the water is tumbling out even though you have rushed to turn off the faucet. All over the bathroom floor. Yuck. Lovely fecal matter and urine, in addition to the weird gel globs from the absorbent material, covered the floor around the toilet. And of course the toilet was so full that I had to remove some of the water before plunging it. Fun times.

My husband ran in to see what had happened. “What in the world are you thinking?” was the response. So yes, I overflowed the toilet. Learned my lesson: Do NOT try to flush more than one flushable insert in a session! Give your toilet some time to settle before going on to the next one. Still, from then on, I just put them in my diaper pail with the used disposables. They say that trashing the gDiapers is still better for the environment than using disposables, so at least it was something.

As far as leakage, we didn’t have too much because the absorbent outer cloth part took care of this. But I was surprised at how soaked it got in spite of the inner liner. After a short nap, I turned the guy over to see that almost the whole cloth part was clearly reaching it’s capacity. I think that somehow the urine went around the liner, directly to the cloth.

Overall, I think the gDiapers work pretty well. I still really like the idea behind them. My disappointment stems mostly from the realization that I would have to buy a lot more cloth covers and do laundry every day because I can only get one use out of each. Even if I could get more uses out of each one, I would always feel like I was putting a potentially dirty diaper back on him. And that’s not too appealing either. The gDiapers can provide some of the benefits of both cloth and disposable diapers, but for me, I felt that I had to deal with the drawbacks of both cloth and disposables as well.

I just checked gdiapers.com today and found that they have recently improved the outer cloth ‘little g’ part and the inner liner. Unfortunately this also caused a small price increase. Each cloth cover is $16.99 and the med/large flushables come out to about 41 cents per insert (in comparison, the Target disposable diapers I use cost about 12 cents per diaper). They recommend, as I would, that you have at least 6 cloth covers on hand. Even this assumes that you are willing to do a load of laundry each day.

I think this product has a lot of potential and I’m very excited to see a company finding creative ways to minimize diaper waste. If the costs were lower and if I had a more durable and efficient washer, I would consider trying them again.