ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — A cloth diaper company that began in New York City is expanding to Montclair, West Orange and other areas of Essex County, it recently announced.

Diaperkind owner Nina Lassam told Patch the company previously branched out to New Jersey before the pandemic, setting up roots in Hoboken and Jersey City. But after getting a steady uptick in requests from other areas in North Jersey – particularly Montclair – the company is expanding again.

The concept is simple, according to Lassam: give parents a way to minimize their environmental impact by using reusable cloth diapers instead of single-use disposable ones. Here’s how it works.

“I could speak about the disposable diaper crisis forever, but the big things to call out are that’s it’s not just how things are thrown away, but also how they are made,” Lassam said. “The thousands of diapers a baby uses a year creates tons of landfill waste, but they also require natural resources to extract and produce; raw crude oil, wood pulp, and scores of chemicals go into an item that – many times – is used for only a few hours.”

“Using a cloth diaper service means that instead of throwing out 90 diapers a week, you’re reusing the same ones — and washing the diapers in energy efficient commercial laundry machines requires about the same amount of water used in just a few toilet flushes a day,” Lassam continued.

Part of the challenge to setting up shop in the Garden State was finding sustainable transportation.

“It has been my ambition to grow the company into New Jersey, but I wanted to find a delivery partner who used an electric van … and I did,” Lassam said. “The business we work with is based in New Jersey and has enabled us to expand our footprint across Essex County.”

“We receive about 15 to 20 requests a week to grow our service area, and by far the largest number has come from Montclair and the surrounding area,” Lassam added. “We’re so excited to be providing cloth diapers for this new part of the state and to do so with an electric van, which helps keep our carbon footprint as small as possible.”

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