Gateway to a Greener Life?

I am curious if cloth diapering has impacted the rest of your lives in any way? Inspired any other green lifestyle changes? Personally, the use of cloth diapers opened up a gateway, in a sense, to a greener more eco-conscious life for my family.

Having used disposables on my twins for at least the first 4 months of life I was no stranger to taking out the garbage and boy did we know how to make some garbage. Usually it was so heavy I'd actually have to wait for my husband to get home to lift it out of the can and bring it outside. This seemed like almost a daily routine.

Suddenly, after starting cloth, I realized that I could take the garbage out! It wasn't loaded with disposables and we also weren't having to take it out as often. Very quickly I realized, what's the sense in using cloth diapers if we aren't also going to recycle? We called our local sanitation department and had our recycling bins delivered a few days later.

After getting the hang of recycling we added two more bins to accommodate all of our recyclables. The end result was that we were only having to take our garbage out once a week and we were putting three bins full of recycling out twice a week! It felt good.

Currently I'd say we're somewhere on the "spectrum of green" between recycling, cloth diapering, purchasing more reusable goods as opposed to disposable ones, attempting to compost (although you might just call it feeding the raccoons), making our way towards eating more healthily, and trying to curb ours and our kids wasteful tendencies.

Could we be doing more? Absolutely! But baby steps are better than no steps at all.

Has cloth diapering led you towards making any additional eco-friendly changes or were you as green as could be before starting to cd?

I'd love to hear your comments!