It’s all fluff and trades until someone gets a smelly stain. This is one of the few offenses that will get you kicked out of the online world of diaper swapping, an increasingly popular way to design, trade and sell your gently used cloth diapers, or “fluff,” The Kernel magazine reports.
You read that right. People are online buying and selling the diapers that once held the waste from their precious bundles of joy. I guess that shouldn’t surprise us too much, after all, there are ladies out there that sell their breast milk to make some money, but still, we wonder, who would buy a cloth that once held poop?
Well, it turns out that tons of moms would. One Facebook group, “The Fluff Exchange,” has some 5,800 likes. Meanwhile, another group, “Diaper Swappers” boasts around 170,000 moms, but why are so many parents into trading these things?
Cloth diapers have tons of benefits for you, your baby and the world around you (minus the whole cleaning up poop at 2 a.m. thing). Cloth diapers don’t contain the pee-sucking chemicals found in disposable diapers and cut down on diaper rash. Plus, they eliminate some of the 3.7 million tons of solid waste American parents throw away in the form of disposable diapers each year.
The best thing for parents, however, is the cost. Up front, cloth diapers cost a bit more than disposables, but pay for themselves by the end of potty training, cutting the $1,000-$2,500 bill on disposables to $400-$1,000, according to The Kernel.
Parents who choose to use cloth diapers for their babies need to be stocked up on their $35 diapers – just as much as disposable users need to be stocked up on theirs. And, that’s the reason for these swapping groups. You can swap diapers for cheaper than purchasing brand new ones. Anyone can join a group, but they are typically banned for foul language or delivering heavily stained or stinky diapers, The Kernel reports.
So far, there hasn’t been a lot of comments on this increasingly popular trend, but that doesn’t stop us from asking: Would you buy someone else’s used cloth diaper, or sell yours for some extra cash?
Image courtesy The Kernel magazine.