All those horrible baby wipes.....

Baby wipes fail to get the negative press that they deserve bearing in mind that the average baby generates thousands of them over the first five years of it's life. Its a tough one because we really need to use them. And often, we need LOTS of them as anyone who has ever looked after a child will know! Because they are small and flat, they slip in, around and behind our other household waste and we barely consider them as featuring in our environmental tag.

The options for us are:

Buy plain old wipes
Buy plain old, 'recyclable' wipes (where facilities exist - I'm not quite sure what this means and despite my best efforts, I am having trouble finding out)
Buy biodegradable wipes (lovely idea but a very much inaccessible for real people as they are so expensive)
Buy cloth wipes, wash and reuse them until they are threadbare

A combination of any of the above is probably as good as any of us can hope for. These days, we are busy folk with muliple demands on our time. With work, childcare, extracurricular activites etc, its all about making things convenient and saving time. Its naive to think that we all have the time to sit in the house growing our own veg, washing hemp nappies and crocheting baby wipes. Too often, groups and services with an environmental slant will try to promote total green living but, as wonderfull and utopic as this may be, it sadly isn't realistic. We all need to think about what we do and make the changes that we can incorporate into our lifestyles. This way, more people will be likely to adopt and maintain these changes.

So here is my new proposal (I am trialling it as we speak). Seeing as the 'facilities' to recycle these affordable baby wipes don't actually exist in the real world from what I can see (I would love it if someone could prove me wrong on this so PLEASE let me know if you have any tenable suggestions), we should try to reuse the ones that we buy. Fair enough, we may only get a couple of extra uses out of them but in the long run, it could save on lots of waste and at least enough cash to buy something nice over a few months.

Many people may be put off by the idea of reusing bog standard wipes but it really is no different to washing reusable nappies or even clothes that have been soiled. I have put all of mine into one of those bags that separates stuff from the main bulk of the washing e.g tights and undies, and washed them with nappies and towels. They all came out perfectly clean as did the rest of the washing. I then flattened them all out and put them in a container with water, half a teaspoon of baby shampoo and a squirt of baby oil (just enough to soak them). The organised amongst you could then put them in changing bag wipe holders or smaller sarnie bags. So far, I am happy to say that second time around, they are as good as first. I have not tried a third yet and I am not sure a fourth is feasable but reuse definately gets the thumbs up from me. Clearly, this can only really be done at home unless you are organised enough to save wipes from when you are out and about but I think its possible to save at least a pack a week. There is no extra cost for laundering as they take up very little volume indeed and cost of shampoo is negligeable. Ok, so you may only save £50-£70 per year but thats a lot of baby wipes that wont be strangling the roots of saplings. Even if we each only try it once and never again, that is still a big saving on landfill so please give it a go!