Wee Care Diaper Service, a cloth diaper laundering and delivery service based in Chattanooga, has kept 50,000 diapers from the landfill since October 2016, officials said.
The service offers weekly delivery of cloth diapers to homes and schools as an alternative to disposable diapers. When they deliver clean diapers, they also take the dirty ones away to be washed.
Co-owners Frank and Maureen Gibson purchased the company from the original founders in October 2016. Soon after the purchase, they expanded the company’s service area to include Knoxville and Nashville. They also began tallying diapers used by clients.
“It is estimated that a single disposable diaper takes hundreds of years to decompose,” said co-owner Frank Gibson. “And knowing that the average child goes through somewhere between 2,000-3,000 diapers, the environmental impact is staggering. We enjoy making cloth an option for local families and we are thrilled at this milestone that Wee Care and the families we serve have been able to achieve.”
Wee Care Diaper Service was established in 2012 to provide cloth diaper home delivery service for cloth diaper users in the Chattanooga area. Chattanooga had not had a cloth diaper service since Tidy Didy Diaper Service, which had been in operation since the 1970s, closed in 1996.