The Great Diaper Debate

My wife and I are having our first kid in about a month and no matter how frugal you are having a kid costs money. How much? Depends on who you ask, but estimates peg it at approximately $250,000 and that’s before considering paying for college. A quarter ‘mil is pretty expensive even if you don’t pay it all upfront so we set out to examine a few ways to minimize those costs. Up first? Diapers.

Read the Year 1 update in this series here!

The numbers

I’m going to contrast the cost of reusable versus disposable diapers but first I want to explain the numbers behind my math. To begin we need to know how many diapers a baby uses, approximately. Estimates vary, anywhere from 6-15/day, but the number that came up most often was 10 and that’s a convenient number to use because it makes the math super easy. At 10 diapers per day with 365 days in a year you’re talking 3,650 diapers/year.

Next up is how long your child will need to use diapers. We’re going to estimate starting potty training at 2.5 years and assume it takes six months to get the kid fully onboard giving us a “no diapers” estimate of three years, or 36 months. All told that’s 10,950 diapers per child lifetime, though actual potty training varies by kid. Where is all of this heading? Down to the big decision: are we going to use disposable diapers, or reusable cloth diapers for raising our kid?

Average cost of disposable diapers

Now that we have our diaper use numbers, how much do diapers cost? The internet estimated $.20/diaper while my own research on Amazon revealed a broader range. Because the Investopedia article is a bit dated (it’s been 8 years and one financial meltdown since it was written) I’m going to use a more conservative $.25/diaper to come up with my target for disposable diapers. With that in mind, here is the breakdown of costs for a year of disposable diapers.

Cost per diaper	Year number	Total cost over the years
$.25	1	$912.50
$.25	2	$1,825.00
$.25	3	$2,737.50

The approximate estimate for a single child’s use of disposable diapers over their lifetime is about $3,000. Let’s take a look at reusable diapers.

Average cost of reusable diapers

Because they don’t have a recurring cost, reusable diapers are supposed to provide a long-term savings after an expensive up-front investment you pay all at once. The modern world of reusable diapers is also a lot more advanced than when I was a kid; we’re no longer talking cotton and safety pins, but rather entire diaper “systems” designed to grow with your child to ensure you only need one set of diapers for your child’s life.

Since a baby uses approximately 10 diapers a day you want your reusable stack to be able to handle that load (no pun intended) without needing to do laundry every 10 minutes. That means 20+ diapers on hand is a good target to ensure you’re not always doing laundry, and we’re going to estimate needing 24 in total. A set of six diapers costs anywhere from $35-$40 on Amazon, but we’ll err on the side of expensive for our estimates with $40 giving us a per diaper cost of about $6.70. So here’s your cost for the first three years of baby’s life using reusables.

Cost per diaper	Year	Total cost per year
$6.70	1	$161.00
$0.00	2	$0
$0.00	3	$0

The comparison

It turns out there’s a pretty substantial savings comparing reusable diapers to disposable diapers. All told you come out ahead about $2,500 over the lifetime of the child’s diaper needs, more or less. If you went the reusables route, set aside the $2,500 into a sold index fund, and let it grow for 10 years collecting approximately 7% in interest you’d have about $10,000 in twenty years. That’s enough to pay for a semester of college at your local in-state public institution. Not too bad for savings!

An additional benefit of reusable diapers is that they’re reusable. If you have additional children? The savings begin to multiply. With your first child you pay the costs of about $200 to buy the diapers meaning you save about $2,500. With your second child you don’t have to pay the costs a second time meaning your savings are now closer to the full $2,700 you’d spend on disposable diapers. Add that to your first set of savings and you’re looking at over $5,000 in your pocket by choosing reusable diapers over disposables.

What’s that smell?

That gives us a look at costs but doesn’t take into account any of the other pros and cons of using disposable diapers versus reusable diapers. First and foremost? Ease of use. Babies are truly amazing, surprising creatures. One minute they’re melting your heart by smiling and laughing at whatever dumb thing you’re doing to capture their attention while the next they’re managing to process breast milk into the smelliest compound on earth and passing it out through their intestines. There are babies out there who could make the entire public bathroom at the Super Bowl cringe with the mightiness of their bowel movements and when you’ve got a disposable diaper? You just scoot that sucker off, tuck the nuclear waste up nice and tidy, and chuck it, never to deal with that particular dosage of awful ever again.

For those on the more frugal reusable plan? You’ve got to get the diaper changed and deal with that liquid evil before the next installment of use. That means cleaning it and storing it and in hands-on fashion at that. Out in public? You’ve got to have a bag with you to store the diaper for processing later. You could pay for a diaper cleaning service, but those costs quickly outpace the savings you get from not using disposables. So that means doing it yourself, and that means having a strong stomach (or just soldiering through your weak one).

Additional costs

Another area of difference between the two diapers is that of additional costs. It doesn’t matter which diaper species you opt for, you’ll need to purchase things like baby powder, butt paste, and wipes to make the entire diaper changing process go more smoothly. Since you invest in those regardless of which type of diaper is right for your family the costs on those are a wash.

On the reusable side you may have additional costs you wouldn’t have with disposables such as diaper liners, a used diaper container, increased water consumption from doing laundry more, and special baby-safe detergent for the diapers. All of these things defray the savings you’re earning a little bit, though overall they’re not sufficient to offset $2,000 in costs. Reusables are still the more economical bet, but the estimates I put together here are just estimates; the real world likes to throw curveballs.

Environmental impact

My wife is a better person than me so for her the conversation on reusable diapers needed to include talking about positively impacting the world around her and reducing the amount of materials we consume in a given year as a family. Depending on how you measure impact, the actual math on the cost to the environment of disposable versus reusable diapers is surprising. Solving for how much carbon each process uses reveals the two are about the same meaning their impact to climate change is almost equivalent.

Additionally, the water usage and energy usage for cleaning reusable diapers puts them on par with the continued water and energy usage of creating new disposable diapers over and over again. You can positively impact that number with a high efficiency washing unit or by generating your own electricity and/or water with solar panels and a rainwater collection unit, but given that nearly all homes in America lack those amenities the call on reusables versus disposables comes down to which one will save you more money, not which is more environmentally friendly.

Our decision

The reality about having your first kid is that you can do all the math you want and then he or she comes along and blows it all to hell. We’ve opted to go with reusable diapers to give them a test run but with costs so low are ready to switch to disposables if we decide the additional work just isn’t worth it. I grew up on a hog farm in Iowa so I put “baby poop” outside my top ten list of “gross things that have touched my body” or “awful smells I’ve encountered,” but we’ll see.

As for you? Make the decision that’s right for your family. Or wait until my six month update when I detail for you how using reusables is going for our family compared to disposables. Make sure to check back and find out whether we headed off to Costco, tails between our legs to shell out the extra cash for the easy way out, or are happy saving for college with all the money we’re keeping from not taking all those trips to the grocery store for diapers!