“Until recently, I haven’t given much thought to nappies (UK for diapers),” I confessed to Sarah Edwards, co-founder of DiaperKind cloth diaper service. “But upon reflection, it’s not hard to see that disposable diapers are one of the failures of the promises of plastics spanning over the last 70 years.”

At once, plastics were a modern miracle; they were to revolutionize our daily lives and improve our families futures. They were to be all at once super and affordable. For generations they’ve been touted them as a perfect resource: reusable, recyclable and largely benign. But none of that ended up being true!

It’s sad, we didn’t focus on creating safe plastics that could be used over and over again. Or if we did, we failed–it may have never been an obtainable goal. The genie got out of the bottle and refused to get back into the new plastic bottle made for her. Over time, plastics have unleashed both a macro and micro plague: mankind and all of the earth’s creatures drown in visible plastic and we’ve saturated nearly every corner of the earth with plastic particles that no microorganism can escape. We are all truly drowning in plastic and it’s a plastic pandemic. On the heels of a new pandemic, COVID-19, and after decades of enduring the continuing pandemic of AIDS, we are sadly coming to grasp that we’ve brought upon ourselves an avalanche of plagues–all with no ready cures in sight.

Take a look at plastic straws. Straws used to be rolled paper. They worked briefly while we sipped our modern drinks. They were fun and largely compostable. Then, industry introduced plastics to the burgeoning fast food industry and all at once a temporary vehicle of pleasure became a permeant mark on our environmental record. Likewise, the marvel of refrigeration brought us loads of ice cream and in just over a decade, one could get a paper cup of ice cream with a wooden spoon in nearly every city and country store on the planet. Over time, those much lower impact, largely compostable bearers of delight became a scourge. That delightful promise has been revealed as an unruly lie.

Diapers too are a one of those failed promises. Anyone in their fifties and over today, started off wearing cloth diapers. There were diaper services, folks labored to wash them; they were truly a highly reusable resource. For all of the myths that we asperse on them now, they were manageable, affordable, and so much more gentler on the environment. Now, disposable (sic) diapers are a cornerstone contribution to a toxic world. Introducing Sarah Edwards of Diaperkind…

Sarah was born and raised on a farm in Wisconsin. “There was no city trash pick-up. There was no city.”, Sarah says, “So reducing, reusing, and recycling was just how it was. Cloth diapers were treated the same as dinner plates or glass jars. You washed them and used them again. And when you outgrew them, they were passed on to their next family. I just never knew anything different.”

Bringing that consciousness to Brooklyn, Diaperkind cloth diaper service was founded in April 2009 with the mission of making cloth diapering accessible and manageable for everyone. In doing so, the three words that resonate at Diaperkind are Community, Environment, and Respect.

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