Cloth Nappy Tree Forum

I just read somehwere that it costs on average £3000 a year for a child in disposables Now I've done me sums and I can't for the life of me work out how it could possibly cost that much! She also stated that it costs roughly £800 a year for cloth and washing and electric.

I can make dispos cost £350 at the most-per year! Which according to this lady means cloth is twice as expensive. She was saying you could save £2200 by using cloth (£3000-£800). I'd love to find that £2200

So how many nappies would you use and how much would it cost you per year for disposables?

When we switched at 4 months old it was costing about £16 a week in disposables. I thought I could spend £16 on a cloth nappy every week instead and sell them on afterwards. It wasn't really down to cost though, more convenience to have nappies I could wash and rotate easily at home, rather than costlier food shops and carrying home disposables, then up 2 flights with a pushchair and shopping. That and putting human waste in the bin, landfill and using synthetic / chemically treated materials. Think as well price of disposables have gone down and prices of fabrics up.

Maybe they are including disposable wipes and nappy sacks in that figure but even so its far too high. It sounds more like the amount up until potty learning to me.

This is a bit of an extract of some workings out I did recently:

If we average out that a baby uses 5 disposable nappies a day from newborn to 2.5 years of age (a very conservative range!) this comes to ~4550 nappies at 14p a nappy this would equal £637. The cost of disposable wipes in this time at 1 pack per week costing £1 would be £130. A total of £767. A pack of 20 BumGenius V4 (a very popular nappy) at £277 and add on the cost of reusable wipes at £20 for 30 we come to a total of £297, a saving of £470. Washing 3 times a week (every other day) with a ¼ the amount of detergent as recommended would cost just pennies (a 28 wash Persil Small And Mighty would last around 100 washes at ¼ the amount costing less than 7p a wash at £6.40 a carton) this would be less than £30 for the 2.5 years, even if ½ the recommended amount of detergent was used the total cost would only be £60. T he amount of electricity used is often recognised at 30p per wash would be £117 for 2.5 years worth of 3 washes per week. The total cost for reusables would still be £444 a staggering £323 cheaper than disposables. That is all without factoring in the resale value of the cloth nappies or the savings for keeping for future siblings!
This allows plenty of flexibility for having a larger number of reusables for a newborn or extras for nursery, grandparents or childminders.


Obviously you can spent more (and very slightly less I believe) on disposable nappies and you can spend more (or a fair bit less!) on reusables but the figures are more accurate....of course I was very conservative on the number of nappies used per day but I figure its better to underestimate the saving than overestimate it and annoy people

we've today started in cloth again after a week in disposables due to the house being a building site at the moment.

we've been using between 6 and 7 nappies a day. so 6.5 per day x 365 is how many per year. not sure how many in a pack, but i guessed 28, which is 84 packs per year. they cost around £6.50 per pack (nature baby ones), so £550 per year. didn't include bags/wipes etc in my calculation.

Some people use those fancy - and expensive - nappy wrapper systems, which might push the cost of sposies up slightly (never mind the extra envorinmental impact ) The CNT calculator above gives the nappies saved by babies in cloth on this forum, it says roughly £1083 is spent per baby on disposables, over the two and a half years of nappies, so £3000 per year sounds a bit much

The 1083 pounds is the money that people would have spent on disposables instead of the cloth they have actually used in addition to their dispo use (even I admit they have their uses). Today it's based on the figures entered by 835 people. It's obviously not a scientific study.

The amount that is not included in the page is the dispo use, which on a quick calculation runs at about 15%-20%. So you can realistically add 20% to 1083 to get the amount of money people would have spent on disposable nappies (had they been using them exclusively) based on total changes of both dispos and cloth over 2.5 years.

1299.6

One thing it does not take into account is the difference in changing rates between cloth and dispos. We hear time and time again that babies are much happier in cloth and that the smell is not as noticeable. If someone were using one less nappy a day because say baby was not waking as often in the night due to discomfort, the figure above could be higher.

The number that still gets me is the Wales and UK nappies laid end to end distance for just 1 years worth of babies (700,000). It's 3.95 times the distance to the moon. Forget pictures of huge mounds of nappies, the problem is staggeringly worse. I haven't a clue what the world figure is but I suspect my little calculator can't handle it.

2397240 nappies 835 babies
Nappies saved from landfill

2,397,240 nappies saved from landfill is the equivalent of 958.9 kilometers of nappies laid end to end. The dry weight of 2,397,240 nappies is approximately 119.86 tons and their wet weight is approximately 599.31 tons. Think about it, that's from only 835 babies, very few of whom have potty trained yet. Cloth nappies have been worn for a total of 401,259 days. The average number of days recorded is 480 days each, which is 53% of the 2.5 years many babies are in nappies. Based on that the total projected nappy saving by all our babies is 4,523,000.

2,397,240 disposable nappies would have cost £479,448.00 (£574.19 per baby). 4,523,000 disposable nappies will cost £904,600.00 (£1,083.35 per baby).

There are approximately 700,000 births in Wales and England every year. Those babies could save 3,791,736,527 disposable nappies from landfill, based on our real world mixed cloth nappy / disposable usage figures. Those nappies are worth £758,347,305.39 to the disposable nappy industry. Go figure where the problem lies.

The total length of 3,791,736,527 disposable nappies is 1,516,695 kilometers. That is 3.95 times the distance to the moon...

anothersquish wrote:T he amount of electricity used is often recognised at 30p per wash would be £117 for 2.5 years worth of 3 washes per week.

I take it that figure must be for boil washing!
For my cold wash, then 60 wash regime, it worked out as 14p a load (I plugged the machine into an energy meter so I would get accurate figures)... and I'm on a higher fixed rate electricity tariff. So 1p per nappy for me. For those that wash at 40 or below, it will obviously be substantially lower than that, though some machines are of course more energy efficient than others, so it will vary,

The stats on our nappy tickers Mr CM has already quoted above based on what our babies are actually using and going on the average dispo price from my article I did in 2008 and they are quite different to those figures you are quoting!! I did a lot of work on to get realistic figures when I wrote the article which you can find here:
http://www.clothnappytree.com/info.php?article=6

I know I need to update it, just need to have time to go through the whole of tescos online and cloth nappy costs again and get proper new figures for this year but I sincerely doubt that the costs would have changed anything near those figures! Another job for my to do list to update it!!