 Hi everybody thanks for clicking on this video which is really exciting because it means one thing and one thing only that you are interested in learning a little bit more about cloth diapers. My name is Emma and I live in the UK in London with my three children and husband. I've got a one-year-old, a four-year-old and a six-year-old and as you may have guessed from the title of this video I am very passionate about cloth diapers and I've used them on all three of my children. Currently my one-year-old is wearing them, they have changed my life and I'm hoping that after watching this video you may be interested in making a switch. I first got into cloth diapers when my six-year-old was in my belly and I was pregnant and we were going to pregnancy classes and the teacher started talking about diapers and at the very end shoehorned in a little bit about cloth diapers. Well that was it and I stayed behind for like another half an hour whilst everybody else left to learn more about them and ever since then I've just been going deep on cloth diapers and finding out all the good that they can do versus all the bad that disposable single use diapers are currently doing in our world today. Not that I want to like scare monger anybody with statistics but I think there's a few key things that I want to start off by sharing. So first up in the US alone so just in the US it's estimated that over 27 billion diapers single use diapers are going to landfill every single year. Now that's just one year and that's just the US. In the UK the stats stands at I'm not sure what it is annually but daily we're sending 8 million diapers every day to landfill. You can't even imagine what these numbers are they're just incomprehensibly huge. The other thing I want to share today is that how many years do we think it takes for one diaper to break down once it does make its way to landfill. I mean we don't know because disposable diapers were only really around since the 1950s but it's estimated that a single diaper can take around 500 years to decompose. Now that's a lot of diapers sitting in landfill or if not in landfill on the side of the road up mountains by lakes it's amazing I don't know about you guys but wherever we seem to go I always seem to see a discarded dirty diaper somewhere and it's it's gross and if they're not in landfill and if they're not tearing up our countryside they're being incinerated. The crazy thing is there is another option and that's what I want to talk about today the cloth diaper which are amazingly becoming more accessible more popular and yeah I'm here to tell you a little bit more about them. I'm going to briefly talk now about the three main benefits that I see to using cloth diapers first up we have the environmental benefits environmentally they are wreaking havoc. We've already briefly touched on the huge volume of waste disposable diapers create and that's before even going into the methane and greenhouse gases that they are giving off whilst being in landfill. Disposable diapers are of course partly made of plastic which just makes them basically indestructible. The next benefit I want to talk about is a financial benefit and this is kind of tricky to calculate because it really depends if you're going to go for Walmart's own disposable diapers or the honest company diapers they're wildly different in terms of price but when it comes to cloth diapers you're looking at about 300 dollars for a complete set of cloth diapers that's kind of medium range obviously you can get lots of different types of cloth diapers I'm going to talk about that a little bit in a moment but for a set of cloth diapers you're looking at a couple of hundred dollars the amazing thing about cloth diapers is that they are of course reusable so if you're going to have subsequent children you can then reuse them with those or you can sell them on and reusable diapers have an amazing resale value so once you're done using your lot for your child if you're not going to reuse them within your own family go ahead and pop them on Facebook Marketplace or eBay or Gumtree and make some of that money back there is an amazing second hand cloth diaper market lots of the diapers that I have a second hand that I sourced on Facebook Marketplace before deep diving into the different types of diapers the third and final benefit I want to mention is the health one and what I mean by that is that disposable diapers and this is what makes them so freaking absorbent are full of chemicals and when we put a disposable diaper onto our baby we're putting those chemicals up close and personal with our baby's skin cloth diapers are natural they're made from natural natural materials like hemp or bamboo or cotton that's what we want to be putting up against our baby's skin not plastic chemical filled things okay now that we've run through some of the reasons that I'm such a fan of cloth diapers and some of the reasons that I think you too should make the switch let's quickly talk about the different types of diapers out there as with so many things in modern society today the jargon and vocab and lingo has kind of I think over complicated the whole issue at the end of the day a cloth diaper is two things okay it's something absorbent and something waterproof that's what makes it a diaper there's I think four different types of diapers there's something called an all-in-one which is one piece of material and has the absorbent and the waterproof piece sewn in another type is called a shaped nappy and this is two parts so you have a separate absorbent part and a separate waterproof part and then there's a pocket diaper which is something that you stuff absorbency into the last type of diaper is something called a flat nappy and this is just one piece of material which is absorbent over which you put a waterproof pant when it comes to my diaper washing routine it's really really simple I collect everything into one big bin with a mesh net when the bin is full I take the net as one and I just pop it straight into the washing machine from there I do a quick rinse and then I just pop on a high wash and that's it once they're done I hang them on the line outside depending on the absorbency of the material they might take different times to dry the thing I would say about cloth diapers is that you can wash them by hand and I've tried this but it takes a long time and I'm not fully sure that it really does good enough job so I would say that you do need a washing machine you don't need outside space you can hang them to dry inside it will just encroach on you a little bit when it's winter here in the UK I will always hang them inside and we kind of live around different clothes hangers if you're fortunate to have some outside space that is perfect that's it guys that's a very quick overview of cloth diapers I really hope you consider switching up it's not a case of all or nothing you don't have to completely go from disposable diapers one day and overnight switch to cloth diapers you could just replace one disposable diaper a day with a cloth diaper and you'd still be saving 365 disposable diapers going to landfill every single year so give it a go borrow some from a friend buy one second hand just try it and see how it goes I promise you it's not as complicated as some people will have you think thanks so much for watching this video I hope you enjoyed it and let me know how you get on on your cloth diaper journey