gDiaper Review
A couple of months ago I posted a review about the green shopping site, Green Cricket. This is a great, green shopping alternative for Canadians and I highly recommend it.
Green Cricket sent me some gDiapers to review and I happily said yes because I had seen them in stores and was curious.
First, let me give you a bit of background on my diaper history. I used cloth diapers exclusively with my daughter, Katelin, until she turned one. At that point, I was working again and the poops were a lot bigger and a lot stinkier than I was willing to have anyone other than me deal with. My son, Jack, was in cloth until about 9 months. To be blunt, his poops were monstrous and I was a wimp and just couldn’t cope with cloth.
Then Tom was born. Already a touch overwhelmed at this unexpected blessing in our life, I was quickly blogged down with dirty laundry and a messy house. The cloth diapers didn’t even last a month and were shipped off to my niece and her new little baby boy. I at least wanted them to be used.
Enter gDiapers. These sounded like a miracle to me. Basically, they consist of a cloth outer wrap, a plastic liner and biodegradable inserts. The inserts can either be composted or flushed. The starter pack also comes with a plastic stick that helps with the flushing part. I’ll get to this little detail in a minute.
The diaper wraps are very cute. There are 2 in each starter pack along with 10 inserts. Mine are orange and off-white. They wash very well and still look quite new even after a couple of months of use. Once you purchase the starter kit, the inserts are a bit pricier than regular diapers, but not by much. A pack of 40 inserts costs $24. This is one of those situations where helping to reduce my footprint on the earth is worth the few extra bucks to me. At $36, the starter kit is certainly less expensive than the initial investment of cloth diapers. However, cloth will save you money in the long run.
I have a hard time getting out to my composter in the winter, so I have tended to flush my inserts. This has caused a few problems and made my husband a bit grumpy. I have also noticed a lot of signs in public restrooms lately asking people to please not flush diapers so I am guessing that my potties are not the only ones that are plugged. There is definitely an art to getting the insert to flush properly. Make sure you read the instructions that come with the diapers and use that little plastic stick that I previously mentioned.
These diapers need to be changed more frequently than regular disposables. Tom has often soaked through the cloth wrap. However, this can also work in your favour as you begin potty training. I’m waiting for Tom’s ‘Aha Moment’ to dawn any time now. I am really ready to be done with diapers!
Are you thinking of getting gDiapers? Here is my list of Pros and Cons.
Pros:
1. Very cute
2. Much more earth-friendly than regular disposables
3. Easy to use
4. Safe on your baby’s skin (no nasty chemicals)
5. Provide a good alternative if you are simply not able to cope with cloth
6. Less of a start-up cost than cloth
Cons:
1. You will have plugged toilets; I recommend composting whenever possible.
2. Pricier than disposables
3. Not as absorbant as disposables
I think that everyone should evaluate their family life and make a decision based on that. Diapers are not a one-size-fits-all prospect (pardon my pun). My own example gives testament to that. What worked for my first-born did not work for my third.
If you don’t think that you can handle cloth diapers but don’t want to see countless disposables enter the landfill, gDiapers would be a good product for you. They are well made and I would recommend them to anyone.
Have you had any experience, positive or negative, with gDiapers? Leave me a comment and let me know.
Filed under Easy Being Green, Reviews, Shopping |8 Responses to “gDiaper Review”
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Interesting. Thanks for the honest review. We used cloth with G–fitted cloth that closed with snaps and had a plastic shell. They worked well, though we did use disposables for night and travel.
When he outgrew the smaller cloth, we switched to disposables. We weren’t sure that the economics of buying larger cloth diapers would work (he could give up diapers at any moment…we hoped). Also, the city started accepting disposables in its Green Bin composting program, which made disposables more appealing (the sort of rationalization a sleep-deprived parent will make).
Cloth worked well for us, but not perfectly. (And diaper services were too expensive.) But G was a fairly normal baby, if a big guy. And we only had the one.
Thanks for your input Craig. I am incredibly jealous of your city’s compost program. I have talked to one of our municipal councillors here and she says that monetarily a composting program is just not feasible in a rural area such as ours. Our municipality is at least providing incentives for people to put composters or digesters on their individual properties. Sadly, disposables don’t degrade in a regular composter so the gDiapers are our family’s compromise. My hat is off to my mother who cloth-diapered five children. However, she didn’t have much choice and I know that this is why she would never in a million years consider eliminating paper towels from her kitchen no matter how much I may blog about it. Anything disposable is like a miracle to her!!!
i’d wanted to use g-diaper when we were away from home, and maybe prefolds with the covers, but then i read something about how the covers weren’t really waterproof and the liners wear out fast and leak. how reliable did you find them to be?
(and yes, i wash my clothes in cold and my homemade soap dissolve quite well. thanks for your tips, too. i’d read dishwasher soap needed citric acid or lemons juice to rinse clean. how does yours handle?)
Hey Susannah- There may be an issue with the gDiaper not being quite as waterproof as other cloth outerwraps. My son has leaked through them on occasion. I’ve really had to be diligent when he wears them to make sure that I am changing him more frequently. I don’t remember as many leaks during my cloth diaper days.
I am VERY excited to make some laundry soap this weekend (how sad is that?) I only wash in cold and that was my biggest concern.
As for the dishwasher, I’ve never added citric acid or lemon juice to get a clean rinse although I have put vinegar in the rinse-aid dispenser. We have a very old dishwasher and occasionally things don’t come out as clean. However, I suspect that it is a bit more of a dishwasher issue than a detergent issue. We have never had a film leftover on any of our dishes.
Happy cleaning!
I’ve been hoping to find a review on these; thanks for the info. I think that you are right that families need to figure out what works for them. I of course love the theory behind cloth, but I’d need to learn how to execute it correctly.
Erin- I’m glad you found the review helpful! There are a lot of great cloth diaper websites and forums out there with lots of info. I did find the diaper cleaning process pretty simple once I had a plan in place (until I became all-consumed by the mountains of laundry created by 3 kids). Once again, you usually have to tweak things to fit your lifestyle-washing diapers is no different.
Thanks for your comment!
[...] be earth-conscious, we are also five human beings who do tend to generate trash. I have mentioned my seething jealousy towards my In-Law’s municipal compost program which has reduced their weekly garbage to a [...]
I purchased these because I wanted to do something good for the planet These are the best. We have used them since our daughter was 2 months old and have never had a leak, or a plugged toilet, or a stinky diaper pail.
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