Petition Tag - cloth diapers

To begin with cloth diapers have many benefits, including:

Environmental: Cloth diapers reduce waste for families with children in diapers by more than 50%.
Financial: Cloth diapers allow families to save more than $2000 per child.
Health: Cloth diapers help parents reduce exposure of their babies’ skin and lungs to the chemicals in disposable diapers.

A subsidy would encourage more families to switch to using cloth diapers, reducing their environmental impact, save money and lessen the stress on our resources.

Since The Great Cloth Diaper Change Event (2011) put cloth diapers into the Guiness Book of Records the image of cloth diapers has changed all over the world. The interest in using using cloth diapers has been growing at a great rate in the Lower Mainland, Langley and the Tricities in the last few years. Many municipalities give subsidies for converting families to this way of life and B.C should be no different.

We should be leading the way and showing the rest of Canada that we care about our childrens environment and the legacy we are leaving behind. We need to support those families who choose to use cloth diapers by making them a more affordable choice at the beginning. With this subsidy and the knowledge base of local cloth diaper retailers we can surely change the enviromental impact in our local and global communities.

*Keep in mind a disposable diaper takes approx. 500 years to start to break down! just think about that for a moment and multiply that by how many diaper changes are done in day for a single child over a 2.5 yr period - that's a dramatic impact on our environment*

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Inaccurate and Misleading Information from Disposables Manufacturers

* It's the late 1980's, people are becoming concerned about the environment. Disposables are on the decline. The disposables manufacturers fight back. Articles and advertisements say disposables are OK. Many mothers, glad to hear that and relieved of guilt, switch to disposables. Disposables manufacturers say energy usage is the same for cloth or disposables, but the fact is that throwaways use five times more energy than reusables.

* About 5 million tons of untreated body excrement, which may carry over 100 intestinal viruses, is brought to landfills via disposables. This may contribute to groundwater contamination and attract insects that carry and transmit diseases. In 1990, 18 billion disposables were thrown into United States landfills.

Is it wise to use 3.4 billion gallons of oil and over 250,000 trees a year to manufacture disposables that end up in our already overburdened landfills? These disposables are not readily biodegradable. The paper must be exposed to air and sun to decompose. Thirty percent of a disposable diaper is plastic and is not compostable. Even if the rest of the diaper could be composted, these plants could only handle 400 of the 10,000 tons of diapers tossed in landfills EACH DAY, assuming they didn't have to process any other compostable garbage.

Biodegradable diapers have cornstarch added to the plastic to break it into tiny pieces. The pieces still end up in landfills.

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