Why Cloth Nappies?

One of the most important decisions you will make for you child will be those that affect his or her future. Our environment may not be an obvious issue but putting off some of those decisions may not be in your child’s best interest, so here are “some facts:

· A baby will need up to 6000 nappy changes for the first two and half years. At 50c per nappy, that is $3000 thrown into landfill, excluding the refuse cost.

 · Around a million nappies are landfilled every day in New Zealand. (Based on 145,000 children under two and half in NZ using 6-7 disposables per day). 

· In 2003 5% of all domestic waste was made up of "nappies and sanitaries"(SWAP data)

· Dealing with nappy waste, costs individual local authorities tens of thousands of dollars a year and the decomposing material in landfill creates methane gas a major contributor to global warming.  

· Even if nappies were 100% biodegradable, you would need to compost them in a separate system as landfill does not provide the right conditions for them to break down.