Add me to the "I doubt it" column on this, but a New York company thinks that parents are ready to leave disposable diapers behind.
Diaperkind is a cotton diaper service similar to those some families have used to launder cotton diapers. Its owners have now launched Esembly, which will deliver a complete kit of diapers, covers, creams and even laundry soap to parents seeking an alternative to disposables.
According to a 2014 Procter & Gamble study, only 10 percent of people who start with cotton diapers stick with them. Diaperkind is similar to other diaper services, collecting and washing cotton diapers.
Esembly believes, though, that future generations will shun disposables.
"By the time Gen Z has babies, they won't even consider using a diaper for one to three hours and then tossing it in a landfill to sit for hundreds of years," Liz Turrigiano, co-owner of Diaperkind and Esembly, a cloth- diaper company, told Crain's New York Business, a sister publication of Plastics News.
But switching comes with some big costs upfront.
"All the supplies needed to diaper a baby have an upfront price tag of about $550," Crain's New York writes. "That's more than 10 times the $50 new parents would spend on disposable diapers for the first month but much less than the thousands they'd shell out for disposables over the course of their child's diaper-wearing years."