Up until now in our series on cloth diaper fabrics, we’ve covered the most common natural fibre fabrics – cotton, bamboo, and hemp.

But there are some very popular synthetic fabrics used as well within the cloth diaper industry – today we’ll look at microfibre.

Microfibre is popular due to its very absorbent nature (it can absorb up to 8x its own weight) and the fact that it dries very quickly. It’s usually made of a blend of polyester and nylon and is spun into ultra-thin threads, thus the name “micro-fiber.”

While microfibre is not biodegradable, it is considered an eco-friendly fabric because of its extreme durability and the fact that it’s designed for repeated use. And, of course, since that’s the whole premise of cloth diapering, it’s a “natural” fit.

There are very few diapers that are made completely of microfibre, however. Since it is so absorbent, it can dry out a baby’s skin if left in contact for extended periods of time. Thus, it’s usually used as a absorbent core inside an all-in-one diaper, such as the Easy Fit (where it’s paired with bamboo – talk about a no-leak combo!) and the AMP AIO, or as an insert in a pocket diaper, as in the Bum Genius and Fuzzi Bunz diapers. If it is designed to be directly against the baby’s skin, it’s usually topped with a layer of suede fleece to provide a soft, stay-dry barrier between the fabric and the skin, such as with the Flip diaper microfibre insert.

Microfibre is certainly versatile and diapers are only one of its many applications. Do you use microfibre in your home for cleaning or in diapers? Do you like it in diapers? What’s your opinion of diapers using synthetic components – is it the best of modern technology or should diapers only contain natural, renewable fabrics? We’d love to hear what you think!

Today is the third installment in our series looking at the fabrics commonly used in cloth diapering. You can see other posts in this series by clicking here.

Bamboo is one of the most popular fabrics for cloth diapers and definitely one of the most chic. It’s luxuriously soft, eco-friendly, and very absorbent. In fact, tests have shown that rayon from bamboo absorbs moisture on contact 70% more quickly than cotton and dries 20% faster. And for softness, it’s known for mimicking silk, cashmere, or french terry fleece.

It’s also with good reason that bamboo has such an eco-friendly rap:

Bamboo retains water, thus requiring very little irrigation.

It puts down deep roots, thereby supporting riverbanks and hillsides and avoiding erosion.

It is naturally anti-microbial, thus needing no pesticides or fertilizers.

It absorbs five times more carbon dioxide and releases 35% more oxygen into the environment than a stand of trees covering the same acreage.

It’s a very sustainable crop, as it doesn’t need replanting for years at a time and it grows very quickly. Once a mother clump of bamboo has taken root – generally about three years – it only takes one growing season of 3-4 months for the shoots to be ready for harvest. In fact, if the growing conditions are just right, bamboo can even grow more than a metre in one day!

When it comes to making bamboo into a textile, there’s a vast difference between conventional and sustainable practices, however. The fibres in a bamboo stalk are very short and cannot be knit directly into a yarn as with most other textiles, so they must be softened, pulped, and stretched like taffy to create the fibres. In the conventional process of turning bamboo cellulose into the silky-soft rayon we know and love, several caustic chemicals are used to soften and break down the fibres, which has a severe environmental impact and destroys the antimicrobial properties of the bamboo itself.

However, sustainable companies, such as the ones whose products we carry here at New & Green, are committed to creating their rayon in environmentally responsible ways. For example, Tots Bots, the makers of the Stretch Bamboozle and the Easy Fit, make sure their processing is done within the strict international environmental standards of ISO 9000 & 14000. The finished product also falls under the coveted European Oeko-Tex standard. And as an added bonus, viscose rayon made from bamboo is more biodegradable than other similar fabrics, including organic cotton.

In the end, organic, sustainably produced bamboo diapers are one of the best choices you can make. Make sure you check out the Bamboozle, the Easy Fit, the BabyKicks 3G, and the AMP bamboo flats!

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Today is the second installment in our series looking at the fabrics commonly used in cloth diapering. You can see other posts in this series by clicking here.

Organic Cotton

Cotton is one of the world’s most in-demand crops: more than 3% of the world’s agricultural land is covered in cotton. That’s larger than the entire country of Germany and approximately the size of all of Central America combined. Yet, organic cotton makes up less than 1% of that total.

In order for cotton to be considered “organic,” it must be grown with non-genetically modified seed and can use no agrochemicals, such as pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, or fertilizers. Considering conventional cotton uses approximately 25% of the world’s insecticides and about 10% of the world’s pesticides, this is a major departure from conventional farming methods. For every T-shirt or diaper manufactured with conventional cotton, between 1/4 – 1/2 lb. of chemicals have been used. This has obvious ramifications for those with sensitive skin or those just wanting to limit their exposure to chemicals and other toxic materials.

Cotton – regardless of growing method – is a beautiful plant. It grows as a medium size bush, blossoms with delicate flowers, and then produces a ball of cotton as the blossom matures.

Cotton is an especially difficult plant to grow, and even more so when the farmer has chosen to grow organically. Insects are commonly drawn to cotton plants (thus the heavy usage of insecticides in the conventional methods) and an organic farmer must be both creative, persistent, and innovative in their methods in order to have a successful crop. Often “trap crops” are used, as well as soil amendments such as compost are used to encourage biodiversity among the plants, which allow other bugs to “take care of” the unwanted guest pests. Cotton also depletes soil of minerals and nutrients more than it filters back in to the soil, so in an organic system it’s an especially important crop to rotate every few years in order to maintain a sustainable operation and profitable harvests.

There are various standards for declaring cotton fabrics to be truly “certified organic,” and among the most stringent of those certifications is the European Oeko-Tex 100. Oeko-Tex is unique because it not only tests the cotton in its raw state, but it also tests the product in its final state for more than 100 toxic substances, as dyes and fabric additives can leave toxic residues on the fabric, including heavy metals, phthalates, and phenols. But good news! – nearly all of the cotton diapers offered at New & Green are organic and many of those are Oeko-Tex 100 certified, including Bummis prefolds and the Flip organic cotton insert.

What questions do you have about organic cotton or what have you discovered in your research about cloth diapering? This post is just the beginning – we’d love to hear from you!

Want to know more? Be sure to check out:

Ekopedia

Organic Trade Association

Sustainable Cotton Project

AboutOrganicCotton.org

Eartheasy: Solutions for Sustainable Living
Storchenwiege
How Eco is Organic Cotton? The Facts on 7 Questions | Gaiam Life

Cotton plant photo credit

Cotton blossom photo credit

Welcome to a new series here on the New & Green blog highlighting the fabrics that are used in the wonderful array of cloth diapers that exist on the market today. Many parents at our Cloth Diapering 101 workshops want to know the benefits of using natural fibres and are curious about synthetic fibres, since they make cloth diapering so easy! Thus this series was born – through the year we will highlight several of the fabrics commonly used in the diapers that don your babies’ bums.

HEMP

Hemp is one of the world’s oldest plants and one of the ones that has been most used through history. It is earth-friendly, versatile, and renewable.

Though it’s a sibling to marijuana, which is grown for the use of its blossoms and leaves, hemp is grown mostly for its seeds and its fibrous stalk, which breaks down easily with very few chemicals during processing. It is known as a very eco-friendly plant, as it grows quickly, requires little water, improves soil nutrients rather than depleting them, is an excellent anti-erosion crop, and is naturally pest-resistant, which eliminates the need for pesticides. It’s also very easily grown without the use of herbicides or fertilizers.

All in all, it is a very “green” crop and can be easily made into thousands of different kinds of products with fewer chemicals than its counterparts. (e.g., in paper making, hemp requires fewer chemicals than wood; in the production of fabrics and other textiles, hemp requires fewer chemicals than conventional cotton; etc…) The end product when made into a fabric is naturally anti-microbial and very durable.

There is a serious downside to hemp, however. While it is now legal to grow hemp in Canada, there are no textile mills able to deal with raw hemp. In the US, not only are there no hemp textile mills, but it’s still illegal to grow the crop. Thus, it’s still necessary and more cost-effective for diaper manufacturers to import finished hemp fabric from other nations, usually China. This certainly increases the “eco-footprint” for any hemp diaper.

There’s also the factor of softness. Hemp is a very sturdy, durable, absorbent material and until recently, most hemp diapers were more practical than swoon-worthy. However, both Annie Marie Padorie of AMP Diapers and BabyKicks have been among the first to use luxuriously soft combed hemp fleece in their diapers – we invite you to pick one up and feel the difference! They’re almost down-right cuddle-worthy…

Mamas (and papas) – what has been your experience with hemp diapers?

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