Pail For Poop

Where to Put the Pee and Poop

I stuck my dirty cloth diapers in a pail, like most people. I went with a trash can holding a fabric liner made for cloth diaper pails.

I’ve heard that a wet pail (with water in it) keeps stains from setting and helps contain odors. But I couldn’t bring myself to keep water in a pail because I’m paranoid. I not only had visions of my kid falling head first into a pail of poopy water, but I had bigger concerns about poopy water spilling all over anything and everything. Our dog got into our diaper pail once right after our first child was born. Cleaning up dirty diapers was not fun, but at least they were dry and nothing had soaked into any furniture or rugs or anything else.

I tried several trash cans before settling on one with a lid from Target. I purchased the lid itself separately. It had a one hand pop up mechanism, but the first one I returned because it stopped popping up. The second lid I got as a replacement had the same problem, so I gave up on that feature and started opening and closing it like a normal lid after removing the pop up springs that came with it.

My diaper pail measured 7.5 gallons (28 liters). It easily held a week’s worth of diapers for my two year old, but keep in mind I used pocket diaper inserts and doubled them up. So after each use, I tossed in two liners, not one, and very rarely tossed in any covers (which don’t add much bulk compared to inserts anyway). With my infants, I washed my diapers every three days or so and my containers had no trouble holding that amount of diapers. Basically I could fit the majority of my supply in the diaper pail. Depending on how many diapers you purchase, you probably want a diaper pail roughly the size (or a bit larger) of your clean diaper storage.

This particular pail fit perfectly between my pedestal sink and my bathroom storage cabinet. It still had plenty of room for the top to open, but blended in with the white floor tiles and storage in that room. I cared more about the fit than the click top mechanism, and the affordable price sold me.

I used an open container with my first two kids, without a lid, and with the same cloth diaper liners. That worked for me for several years, but my husband objected to it on principle. By the time our third child came along, I had moved the cloth diaper pail out of the nursery and into the bathroom, where I could dump cloth diapers from both the kids’ room and our room (where the baby slept and where I had all his clothes and other things) without needing to buy a second diaper pail. By then my eldest had been potty trained for about six months, and my toddler used only a few cloth diapers a day, so the infant accounted for most of the diapers.

I never had a problem with odors except when emptying the entire bin into the washer. Luckily I closed the lid of the washer quickly and solved that issue. As an added bonus to using garbage bins for cloth diaper pails, when I switched to a pail with a lid, I put the old open bin into use as a dirty clothes bin. So I’ve gotten good mileage out of both bins and they will continue to be useful well past our cloth diapering stage.