Why Natural Baby Products?

Parents today are looking for Natural Baby Products.

I am one of them. Back in 1995 when my first son was born I discovered that most baby products were disposable, made from plastic and were chemically based. As I searched for natural baby products as an alternative for my child, I found the search to be long and hard.

In the USA and UK, Natural Baby Products were already in full swing, but in Australia, it was hard to find a child birth video showing natural birth, a cloth diaper that was easy to use or a breast pad that re-usable breast pad that wasn't made from polyester. They simply didn't exist.

The internet was not yet in mainstream use but there were a few mail order companies providing Natural Baby Products. After many phone calls, searching through magazines and looking through market stalls, I found a few baby products that were natural but organic cotton products did not exist at all.

In July 2000, I started Nature's Child as a small mail order business. We got a great response from our first catalogue which contained only 15 items that I had managed to source, mostly from local, home based suppliers. We got a great response and then I knew that I was not the only parent looking for Natural Baby Products for their child.

By then, I was a mother of two young children so could only run the business idea from home and on a very part-time basis. Environmental awareness certainly existed but the shops were not supplying them. Diapers were my main interest. This was a product that I needed to use 8 times a day on my child. I tried disposable nappies for a little while but couldn't stomach the smell and waste that resulted from every day use. I found that research coming out of the USA and UK from the National Association of Diaper Services found that there was a clear environmental advantage to using natural baby products. Despite this, Choice Magazine in Australia reported in 2004 that 89% of Australian Parents use disposable nappies either full time or part-time.

In order to manufacture these non-natural baby products, it takes upwards of 82,000 tons of plastic, and 1.3 million tons of wood pulp (or 250,000 trees) to cover the bottoms of 90% of the babies born in the US.

Parents with children of eczema and allergies were another group besides environmentally aware parents who needed Natural Baby Products as a matter of urgency.

Natural baby products are better for the environment in many ways. As a rule, natural baby product services (nappy or diaper services) use biodegradable detergents, not harmful phosphates. The waste water produced from washing these natural baby products is benign, while waste water from manufacturing wood pulp, paper and plastics that disposable nappies are made of, contains dioxins, solvents, sludge and heavy metals. While some natural baby product producers employ chlorine to bleach their nappies (many now produced non-bleached nappies), the environmental impact of the paper bleaching for disposable nappies is far worse.

Of course, cotton is not with out its own issues – most farmers employ some sort of herbicide; however organic cotton nappies are now available on the market. At the end of the day you can look at it like this: compare the impact of producing and disposing of, say 8000 paper and plastic nappies over the average nappy wearing period of a child, with that of a few dozen cotton nappies, and come to your own conclusion. Natural baby products in our opinion win hands down (or is that pants down!?).

Natural baby Products V Synthetic – which is better for baby?

It would seem that the major health issue relating to nappies is nappy rash. The contributing factors causing nappy rash are not what you might think. These range from food irritations, to soaps used on the baby’s skin. However the best way to reduce nappy rash is frequent nappy changes. For this reason, a baby using non natural baby products may experience more rash symptoms than one using just natural baby products. The reason behind this? Because disposable nappies feel dry, parents tend to change them only every 4 or 5 hours. Although the outer layer may appear dry, bacteria from urine is still present in the nappy, and still comes into contact with the baby’s skin.  Not only this, but plastic nappies do not breathe, and this means that harmful ammonia that is formed inside the nappy due to bacterial breakdown of urine, can’t be released. Natural baby products such as cotton nappies or wool wraps are breathable, and allow the circulation of air around the baby’s skin, providing for a much healthier environment for baby.

Dioxins are a serious health issue, as they are known to cause birth defects, cancer, liver damage and skin disease. Dioxins are a by product of the paper bleaching process used to manufacture disposable nappies – and trace quantities may exist in them.

Other harmful chemicals are also present in non natural baby products – such as what makes super-absorbent nappies just so absorbent. If you’ve ever used these kinds of nappies, you may have noticed beads of clear gel left on the baby’s genitals after a nappy change. This substance is sodium polyacrylate, which is absorbs up to 100 times its own weight in water. This is the same substance that was removed from tampons back in the mid 1980’s because of its link with toxic shock syndrome. No studies have been done on the effects of this chemical being in contact the baby’s genitals for 24 hours a day for upwards of 2 years.

With an ever increasing population, the call for the use of natural baby products has never been higher. Even if you leave aside all the environmental and health issues, which would you prefer to be on your baby? Cotton is purer, simpler, softer and more comfortable on baby than paper and plastic. If our babies could, I bet they’d choose natural baby products every time.