There is a raging debate on the internet about whether disposable diapers or cloth ones are better. I'll try to prepare the facts so that you can evaluate them for yourselves.

Cloth diapers do have an environmental effect. Firstly, the cotton needs to be grown which needs irrigation and involves the use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. Then the cotton is manufactured into fabric. This process requires electricity. Then the fabric needs to be shipped to where it can be manufactured further into a fitted diaper or to where you can buy it. If it is made into a fitted diaper then it need requires further electricity. One thing to note is that these environmental costs are a one time thing not on going like they are with the production of disposable diapers.

After you've got your diapers, there is the environmental cost to washing them. First there is the water usage. Each full load of laundry uses about 170L (45 gallons) of water. I would guess, from my experience, that you could easily get 40 diapers in a full load. That works out to be 4.25L(~1.1 gallons)/diaper change. The average flush of the toilet uses about 13L(~3.5 gallons) of water. There is also the electricity costs for the washer and the dryer.

There are a few ways that you can keep this to a minimum. Use two diaper pails. When one fills up put it in your laundry room and get your other one. If you do this then you will always have a full load of laundry. Also, you can dry them outside in the summer or on a drying rack in your house. Another alternative would be to buy organic cotton for diapers in order to avoid supporting the use of chemicals in cotton farming.

The production of every diaper requires paper, which means trees need to be cut down. There is also the use of petrol products to produce the plastic on the diaper. Bleach and other chemicals are used to manufacture the paper as well. They also expend electricity in their production and expend fuel as they’re shipped to stores plus fuel used by the consumer getting to and from the store. After the diapers are used, they then need to be sent to the landfill.

Now consider that the average kid will use about 5000 diapers. I conservatively estimate that each cloth diaper can probably be used 100 times. That means that only 50 cloth diapers are needed per child instead of 5000 disposable diapers. From common sense it is not logical to consider the two options as environmentally equal. There are some links below that have more discussion on the environmental benefits of cloth diapers. Some of them include statistics on the resource usage of disposable diapers. I've intentionally not included them in this article because they are not substantiated. I've also tried to avoid commercial sites selling cloth diapers. There are propogandists on both sides. I tried to keep my arguments logical and clearly defendable.