Colored cloth diapers don’t absorb better than undyed diapers. They don’t give your baby a better fit.

So, what is the point of colored diapers?

We make colored cloth diapers for 5 reasons.

5. Happy Baby

Once your babies are old enough to recognize and love colors, you will probably find that they have preferences. Cloth diapering becomes so much easier when your toddler looks forward to diaper changes with a favorite color.

4. Happy Parent

Colors are fun. When you see a color you like, you add a little joy to your task. You smile while your baby is watching you. Your baby smiles back. Diaper changing time becomes a time of happy smiles. If you consistently make a stinky face while you are changing diapers, your child won’t enjoy that time quite so much.

3. Happy Diaper Maker

Our work space is gorgeous! We have colors everywhere. In the same way color adds a little joy to a diaper change, it adds joy to diaper making time. Beautiful colors make for a pleasant work environment.

2. Low-impact Dye

Sustainability matters to us. We love the idea of using natural dyes, but we know you demand color-fast dyes. Without high-impact mordants, nasty chemicals that help the pigments attach to fibers, most natural dyes won’t give you bright, lasting colors. Fiber-reactive dyes create a permanent bond with the fibers, and the dyes are fixed on cotton with simple soda ash.

It also takes less energy to use fiber-reactive dyes, since room temperature to body temperature water does the job. We chose to balance color and impact with fiber-reactive dyes.

1. Our Customer Asked for Them

We thought Firefly Diapers would be all about the plain, undyed diaper. Our sister company, Fuzbaby, is all about color. We loved Firefly Diapers for their excellent functionality. Well, it turns out that not everyone wants just function. You want beautiful diapers! Our customers asked, nudged, requested, and demanded Firefly Quick Dry Diapers in colors, so we made them. Then, our customers collected colored diapers.

Usually, Quick Dry Color Diapers are undyed on the inside, but we sometimes use up small pieces of fabric and lulls in production to create Firefly Quick Dry Color Clown diapers, with colors in every one of the six pieces and trimmed with organic cotton thread. These popular, colored diapers are in stock now.

Ode Magazine has a beautifully photographed story this month on cotton in India — on conventional, pesticide-laden cotton in India. The farmer suicides continued at a rate of one every eight hours as the photographer was visiting. Expensive pesticides and genetically modified seeds (which mean they can’t save seed for planting next year) have meant soaring costs, leaving the farmers in debt they can’t overcome.

Add to this the rising cost of water, decreasing soil quality, health problems caused by chemical exposure and the absense of other jobs in the rural areas, and it’s easy to see why India’s farmers are desperate.

They don’t see any other way out. The situation is not better in other cotton growing countries.

At London Fashion Week a couple of weeks ago, Kathrine Hamnett (known for many slogan T-shirts in the 1980s) did not show a new collection. She showed a film on the impact of the global cotton industry’s pesticide use. The film is part of the Environmental Justice Foundation’s Pick Your Cotton Carefully campaign. Why whitewash cotton? The true of child labor, slavery, and health and environmental degradation is nasty.

• White Gold: The True Cost of Cotton – short film with Uzbekistan focus. (The You Tube link works better for me.)
• Pick Your Cotton Carefully PSA. Quick wake-up call to middle class.
• The Deadly Chemicals in Cotton. Report.

Cotton is a serious choice, not a pleasant way to make yourself feel good about your environmental choices. When you choose cotton, organic cotton is essential to the well being of other humans.

Pick your cotton carefully. Ode could only manage to list a couple of high-profile celebrity designers using clean cotton. You can find many more organic sources than that. Ask for organic cotton. DEMAND organic cotton.

As Kathrine Hamnet said, “It’s not about choosing something else, it’s about choosing the right cotton.”

If you doubt whether your choice to buy “Made in USA” apparel, including cloth diapers, has any effect on the domestic economy, read about the difficulties in “A Loom with a View: The U.S. Organic Cotton Industry Has a Tough Row to Hoe.”

The challenge of supporting U.S. farmers is compounded by the fact that the domestic apparel industry has been, for all intents and purposes, dismantled.

The choice, the author writes, is in the hands of consumers. There has been more interest in where food comes from. Perhaps consumers will also think about where their clothing comes from. Who touches your clothes from field to loom to sewing machine?

So maybe supporting domestic, sustainable cotton production is less an issue of economics than a test of values. Do U.S. consumers value domestically grown, processed, and manufactured clothing? Is it important that the fiber keeping us warm is made closer to home? Or are we content with having all the clothes we wear be grown and sewn overseas?

Does it matter to you where your clothes and your baby’s diapers come from? It matters to us. Remember, Firefly Diapers are proudly MADE IN USA. We are concerned about the long-term viability of the U.S. economy, about fair labor, and about clean fibers. If you buy new clothes this season, investigate the supply chain. I know you care, too.

Yesterday I read about Sim Sweatshop. I like a challenge. How would I do as a worker in a sweatshop–beyond that of my own making, of course? Not so well. The game is made to help you lose. That is the point. If you are a visual learner, try playing Sim Sweatshop. This is a digital art piece commissioned by a growing arts festival in Nottingham (England). At each difficult choice you have to make (Do I join a union? Do I buy shoes for my own child?), there is a background story from labor reports.

Put that together with an article on Wal-Mart this past week, and I’ve been grinding away on the idea of fair labor for the masses. Is it possible? Is fair labor clothing already available around the corner? Are Behind the Label and the Clean Clothes Campaign soon to be obsolete? Not so fast. Hold on to your greenback dollars if you plan to buy green.

Dave Robert’s article last week on TomPaine.org reported on the Wal-Mart CEO’s speech to employees last October on greening the company. Even the Rocky Mountain Institute is helping them green their trucking fleet.

One thing that bothered me about organic standards when I first joined the Organic Trade Association (OTA) was the lack of social standards to match the environmental standards of the USDA program. National Organic Program only covers food, though, and cotton is only certified organic under this program because cotton seeds and cottonseed oil are used in food products. Only on the level of agriculture is cotton currently certified organic.

There are several organic textile standards in the world that cover every stage from agriculture through processing, and discussions are advanced to adopt an international standard to harmonize all of the existing standards. The Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), which will be adopted by OTA, will allow certified products to cross freely into markets around the world. The best thing about GOTS, as far as I am concerned, is the adoption of the adoption of the base code of conduct for trade.

Back to Wal-Mart. I already knew that Wal-Mart has become the biggest single buyer of organic cotton in the world, but I realized the Wal-Mart CEO isn’t a treehugger. I hadn’t read about the CEO-to-employee speech before, though, so I was curious to know what impact this commitment to organics would have on their notorious lack of concern for fair labor in production as well as in store.

It must have been interesting to employees to hear their big boss talk about all of the good Wal-Mart was doing in the world, anticipating what this would mean for them. Will they be paid a fair wage? Will they get health care? “Even slight overall adjustments to wages eliminate our thin profit margin.” Oh. So, is that a no?

How odd is that? If Wal-Mart’s clothing is to be certified under GOTS as it is adopted by the Organic Trade Association and other world certifying bodies, their agriculture and processing will have to follow GOTS minimum social criteria. Producers of Wal-Mart clothing will have the right to collective bargaining and living wages, among other promises. But the sales people in the store will still lack living wage and health care.

Where do you draw the boundaries of sustainability? If you are going to buy organic, make sure your whole supply chain is committed to the environmental and social standards that implies in at least a minimally convincing way. Better yet, by from the small stores committed to whole sustainable communities.