Sustainable Baby: A Parent's Practical Guide to Consuming Less and Livin g Better

By Debbie Hodgson

SUSTAINABLE BABY is a guide to making life easier on your pocket and to help you live more sustainably.
It's no longer an 'alternative' view that our current throwaway, spendthrift lifestyle is coming to the end of its expiry date. the continual squeeze of drought and water restrictions, hikes in petrol and food prices, interest rate and rent rises, and the latest economic crisis is pushing everyone to consider the environment and their finances. As all parents soon realise, trying to be frugal and environmentally aware goes down the gurgler with children - along with the idea of a full night's sleep. Sustainable Baby is a guide to making life easier on both your pocket and to help you live more sustainably. Re-discover the simple life with ideas to recycle, make your own toys, extend the life of children's clothes, fabulous ideas for children's parties and gifts, and tempt even the fussiest eaters with tasty recipes from finger food to meal suggestions. Sustainable Baby is a must-have for all parents wanting to explore a creative family lifestyle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780730498056

Debbie Hodgson

A writer for six years with the international Newsweek franchise, with freelance experience at Australian newand parenting magazines, Debbie Hodgson www.debbiehodgson.com has the journalistic skills and know-how to put a practical, accessible and well-researched book together. She’s also a mum to a two-year-old son. She lives in the Blue Mountains, NSW.

Book preview

Introduction

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed

(Mahatma) Mohandas Gandhi

It’s no longer an ‘alternative’ view that our current throwaway, spendthrift lifestyle is coming to the end of its expiry date. Last year (2008) was a wake-up call for many reasons — the continual squeeze of drought and water restrictions, hikes in the price of petrol and food, interest rates and rent rises, then finally the banking crisis, showing us that capitalism is highly fallible, and greed perhaps our society’s major downfall.

However, as parents of the newest generation we’re optimistic. We have to be! It’s certainly no time for giving up; but it’s no time either for increasing our spending and expanding our environmental footprint. Unfortunately, when we have a baby, our environmentally virtuous ways can go the way of long nights of restful sleep — down the gurgler. Suddenly all the great ideas, like using cloth nappies or making our own baby food, seem too much like hard work, and we don’t know where to start. Just the extra consumption a baby requires leaves me, for one, constantly on the lookout for ways in which we can offset our carbon and water footprints.

Our saviour could be the fact that today’s challenge is not new. The normal state of resources is to be finite and scarce, and our grandmothers and grandfathers knew a lot about how to make a small amount go a long way. It seems to me that our parents forgot a lot of that wisdom and those skills during their generation’s acquisition of wealth and the growth of technology and medical science. The heyday of feminism (welcome though it was) didn’t help to preserve the domestic arts. Fortunately for us, and our children, much of our grandparents’ knowledge still holds true, and reviving it can be a lot of fun.

The tips in this book are not meant to be prescriptive. They are about possibilities and what works for you; otherwise it’s not sustainable. For example, if you use cloth nappies you do an extra couple of loads of washing every week. You can offset that water use by simply flushing the toilet a couple of times less often every day, washing the car carefully with your shower water, or planting grass and plants with low water needs.

On the other hand, if you can’t break your addiction to the convenience of plastic nappies, you might choose to reduce the amount of other rubbish you put into landfill (though it would need to be a huge reduction to offset the sheer volume of nappies). That might mean composting or worm farming, banning plastic bags from the house, or using a reusable menstrual cup rather than disposable pads and tampons — whatever you and your family feel you can do.

Big decisions, like buying a bike and giving up the car, or building a low-energy house, going vegetarian or changing jobs, can turn our environmental footprint from giant to tiny. But smaller efforts also have a cumulative effect on our peace of mind and on the world outside. Choose a school close to home or a home close to schools, and walk your child to and from school. Make meat a once-a-week treat, or keep your own chickens for eggs and manure for the vegetable garden. There are lots of ways to live more sustainably.

This book is about bringing beauty and simplicity to those efforts. Having a child often brings back memories of slow days tinkering with crafts — finger-knitting, woodwork and pottering in the garden, with one of our parents showing us the way. Much of what we ate and wore was made at home, and somewhere within us, we deeply appreciated this.

Now, as adults, we’re not sure how to find the time to give that to our children, even if we remember how to. I think it’s possible to reawaken it. Why not start with one or two ways to slow down your life with your child, and show him or her the joy of working to create, rather than the bind of consumption and slaving to pay for it.

I once overheard a young mother say to another in a department store queue: ‘I’m glad I have shopping to do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have anything to fill my day.’ It made me stop and wonder what the baby in her stroller thought about that. There are so many ways to focus on your child and start the life-long lessons about making and conserving, not just consuming and discarding. Yes, making your own and making do with less, all takes time, but then again, so does traipsing around shops with a tired and overstimulated toddler!

1

Nappy love

Yes, nappies …

No matter what toileting arrangements you have made for your baby, the disposal of poo and wee is something that is going to occupy more space in your mind than you would perhaps like. Most newborns need something like 12 nappies in a 24-hour block. Toddlers may only need about five or six. Assuming that your child will be completely out of nappies at the age of three (although many are still in night nappies until much later these days), you’ll use an average total of 7665 nappies, for one child.

That’s a large heap of methane-producing stinky plastic nappies when you think about it.

Unless you practise Elimination Communication, where you and your baby are so in sync that you can hold her over a toilet when she is about to ‘go’, then you’ll need some sort of nappying system. Although something like 90 per cent of Australian babies wear disposables according to a Choice magazine survey published in 2001, the art of cloth nappying is enjoying something of a revival, aided by internet forums and supportive chat groups. Whether you chalk it up to the organic movement, nostalgia for the simpler days when we had to recycle, or just the desire to be a little bit different, it’s a growing trend.

At the same time, finding out about cloth nappies and finding them on the shelves is near impossible. No one is making much money out of them, which is the main obstacle. But if you are a cloth nappy user, persist in asking at your local baby store why they don’t stock them. Soon enough they will have to.

Reasons to change to cloth

Not only will you save yourself thousands of dollars for your family budget, you will have the satisfaction of putting less into the coffers of multinational corporations. You will put fewer chemicals into our sensitive environment, and fewer chemicals and irritants in contact with your baby’s sensitive skin. Add to this the deep satisfaction you get from recycling this most basic of items.

If you like the idea of cloth nappies but have doubts, read ahead to see how commonly raised objections to cloth are mainly untrue, exaggerated or able to be overcome.

Objection 1

The hassle of extra laundry

People often argue that working parents don’t have the time for washing nappies, but the reality is that we parents never have enough time, no matter how many labour-saving devices and products we buy. What tasks we decide to do are completely determined by our values, not by the number of minutes in our day. My husband and I wash and fold nappies every other day. But I admit we only washed the car once in the year after our baby was born!

Instantly save time, water and hassle by dry-pailing instead of soaking. With a little knowledge and experience, you will get away with spending only an extra 10 minutes a day. Meanwhile, think of the bits of time you save on shopping for nappies — no more emergency runs to the pharmacy to buy more disposable nappies when you run out.

Objection 2

Cloth nappies use water and chemicals to wash so are worse for the environment than disposables

I think this argument is silly. Do we ask people to use paper plates and plastic forks instead of crockery and cutlery to save water? But given that the water supply is a hot issue in Australia today, the objection demands to be examined.

Any comparison of water use has to take into account all the water consumed over the whole lifecycle of the product. Manufacture of disposable nappies is highly water-intensive, as well as chemical-intensive. That’s for the production of super absorbent polymer and wood pulp for the padding, as well as contamination of water by chlorine and other chemicals used in bleaching nappies. Water, as well as fuel, is also squandered on the packaging, marketing and distribution of these one-off, single-use products.

Cotton grown for cloth nappies is water-intensive also, but it’s for the purpose of a reusable product. As for laundry, if we wash smart (and we should anyway), we can be using far less, for instance, than the amount our toilet uses to flush every day.

Objection 3

Nappy rash

I’m not sure why cloth nappies are still associated in people’s minds with nappy rash, even though modern fabrics are extremely breathable. In fact, the incidence of nappy rash has actually increased in babies during the time that we have switched to disposables. Cloth, used properly, should minimise it. This is for several reasons:

These days, there are fantastic breathable covers for cloth nappies, not the PVC plastics of yesteryear.

Cloth becomes smelly and wet with urine (whereas the crystals in disposables turn urine to gel which doesn’t feel wet, and special chemical deodorants disguise the smell). So with cloth, both baby and carer become aware that it needs changing. Most experts agree that changing nappies more frequently helps to prevent nappy rash.

More changes mean more opportunity to have nappy-free time. When my generation were babies, we often went bare-bottomed, but the disposables boom and our growing squeamishness means that these days babies always seem to be pretty much fully dressed. Nappy-free time not only helps babies become more body-conscious (helping toilet training and probably self-esteem) but regularly exposing the bottom and genitals to air is beneficial for the skin.

Ultra-dry disposables may be drying out the natural oils and moisture of baby’s skin, making it more irritated and sensitive.

Objection 4

You have to change more often

True. However, regular nappy changing is more important to baby’s health than whether his hands and face are clean. Yet parents often brave screams and wriggling to wipe a toddler’s face several times a day. Is that because (unlike the nappy area) it’s on public display?

Funnily enough, the more you have to change your baby, the less both you and baby find it a bind. It’s an opportunity to have face-to-face contact with your baby, talking, tickling and kissing her tummy. It’s also a chance for baby to be naked for a short while. If you can change your own perspective to having fun at nappy change time, your baby can start to enjoy the attention.

Here are my two hot tips for changing a baby or toddler:

Give her advance warning! Tell her about 30 seconds in advance so she can get herself ready and finish playing. Think about it from her point of view — would you like to be up-ended on a mat when you were in the middle of doing something?

Eye contact is essential. It makes baby feel that she is special and turns a chore into a nice chat. If you are looking into your baby’s eyes, maybe talking to him or singing a song, he’s more likely to stay still for the change.

Objection 5

You can’t use cloth overnight

Not true. Parents of heavy wetters find that even premium disposables leak at night. However, since you can add extra layers to a night-time nappy (regardless of bulkiness, since they’re asleep anyway), you can keep on adding to the amount of absorbency. And where plastic disposables reach their ultimate absorbency and can go no further, breathable wool and fleece covers can let the moisture pass through, making room for more to come. See later section on Night-time nappies in Chapter 1.

Objection 6

Carers don’t want to use cloth

This is something you need to figure out for yourself. Some childcare centres use cloth, though these are becoming fewer every year. However, if you explain why you don’t want to use disposables, I can’t imagine anyone would actually object to assisting you in your efforts.

One of the reasons a carer might be reluctant to use your cloth nappies is that most people think that folding them is a bind. Pre-folded nappies or fitted nappies can solve your problem. My son’s occasional carers were wary of cloth at first, but when they discovered that I used velcro-fastening fitted nappies, they were fascinated. The next time I went, I took plastic nappies, and they were disappointed! It seems they liked the idea of doing something different in their routine for a change. Now I always take cloth for him.

Why you might want to avoid disposables

You can’t control their impact on the environment

The Women’s Environmental