I must admit I was a tad cynical going into the interview with Debbie Hodgson, author of Sustainable Baby, a new book for new parents who are looking for ways to consume less and live greener lives. The main reason was because I was a disposable nappy user and felt no need to apologise to anyone about it. Yes, I know that I've probably used close to 16,000 nappies over the life of my two children, contributing God only knows how much methane and landfill to the already shaky environment. But I remember the moment clearly when I made the decision to use disposables. It was the first nappy change of my first baby, about four hours in. Here's something I have to fold myself, and, eek, launder once it's been used (what, that lovely washing bin you get in the maternity hospital doesn't come home with you, and you pop in a dirty nappy and a clean one miraculously appears on the shelf above it?) or here's a neat, little package with sticky bits, that I can throw in the bin and never think about again. Option two please.

Hodgson admits though that she was a disposable user too until her son Torsten was five months old. It was a gift from a friend a cute cloth nappy covered in sheep designs that spurred her on to look for alternatives.

''Many, many hours of internet research later, I had started really thinking; thinking about the hidden costs of disposables which I had ignored up until then and realising that 'convenience' alone doesn't mean as much to me as I assumed,'' she writes in the opening chapter of the book, a chapter entitled Nappy Love.

''When we had Torsten we were living on the northern beaches of Sydney, it was a very consumerist lifestyle, everyone had the latest pram, the babies were in designer clothes,'' says Hodgson, now living in Blackheath in the Blue Mountains ''it's like preaching to the converted here.

''But I have a rebellious streak and I just thought 'no' there has to be more to it than this. I remember the sense of being overwhelmed by it all, we were living in an apartment, I bought this big box of nappies, 100 newborn disposables and they didn't even last a week, and throwing them all out in our one bin. I didn't know what to do about it.''

For more, pick up a copy of today's Canberra Times