How many nappies can I save potty training earlier?

You may not realise it, but you can save quite a lot. We’ll explain below. Don’t worry we've done the maths, but it is quite striking how many you can save in quantity and in costs.

This can have a massive impact on the environment, if more and more parents decide to try and potty train their children earlier, even a month or two sooner can help.

The numbers: How many nappies does a child use?

We have put together the below tables showing the number of nappies used on average per day using data from Pampers and the NHS:

Age of child	Type of nappy soiling	Total per day
		Wet	Bowel movement
0-6 months	6	4	10
6-12 months	6	2	8
12 months+	4	2	6

As you can see older babies need fewer nappies day. If we extrapolate the data, the number of nappies used over a year is as follows:

Age of child	Nappies/ day	Days	Total
0-6 months	10	182.5	1,825
6-12 months	8	182.5	1,460
12 months+	6	365	2,190
		Total in 1st year	5,475

On average in the first year of your child’s life you will have changed over 3,000 nappies. It is quite a staggering figure. As parents you don’t necessarily realise the fact until you look back.

The costs

Let’s take a look at the cost of all of these nappies. Using figures from Nuby that are UK costs and don’t take into consideration wipes, nappy bags etc.

Nuby says that the average cost is 14.6 pence per nappy (Cheaper ones available, but there are also more expensive ones, but this is an average).

The below table shows the costs of nappies by age of child:

Age in years	Nappies used	Cost/ Nappy	Total cost
1	3,285	£0.146	£479.61
1.5	4,380	£0.146	£639.48
2	5,475	£0.146	£799.35
2.5	6,570	£0.146	£959.22
3	7,665	£0.146	£1,119.09
3.5	8,760	£0.146	£1,278.96

If you child is still wearing nappies at three and half years old, you could have spent £1,278.96. If you use disposable nappies let’s look at the environmental cost of nearly 9,000 nappies that will be going in the bin to landfill or to be incinerated.

How much can you save by potty training early?

The below chart demonstrates how many nappies can be saved if the child is potty trained before the age of 3.

For example, if your child is potty trained at 2.5 years old, you would save 1,095 nappies amounting to £159.87.

If your child were to be trained even earlier let’s say at 18 months, 3,285 nappies could be saved and £479.61 saved.

Naturally, there are variations in price and number of potential nappies used plus we haven’t added in the cost of wipes and disposal bags.

Aside from the potential monetary savings, this could save many thousands of disposable nappies going into the trash and taking 500 years to decompose if it is in a landfill site.

These figures are for just one child. Just think if only 10% of the parents in your town, region, country were to potty train their children even 6 months earlier the amount of money and waste that could be saved would be monumental.

Marginal gains (savings)

If you start potty training early, your child won’t be potty trained overnight. However, the sooner you start the sooner you can make savings.

It might be that you only save one nappy per day. When we say save we mean if when you put your child on the potty the nappy is dry and clean, you can use it again after they have gone to the toilet.

The more you potty train, the more often you will be able to ‘save’ or ‘reuse’ the nappy. So from one to two to three nappies per day being saved. It may seem small, but it can all add up.

The above calculation is for getting your child from being always soiling nappies to being potty trained. It doesn’t account for the marginal gains that can be achieved in the process of potty training.

To put it into context in 2024:

There were 1,358,107* UK children aged under 2

94%** use disposable nappies, (1.2 million)

If everyone saved just 2 nappies per day

2.5 million nappies could be saved every day

That adds up to over 931 million nappies a year

^* Statista 2024

^** Environment Agency

1.4 billion nappies could be prevented from going into landfill and £209 million saved by parents every year, by just saving 2 nappies per day!

Of course, some children may already be potty trained before 2 (yay), but assumptions aside the savings to parents and the environment could be monumental.

What have you got to lose?

Try potty training your child today, you have nothing to lose apart from the cost of nappies from your shopping bill each week. If you’d like to know how to potty train early, join one of our short training courses and we’ll give you all the information you need.

The training takes less than an hour and gives you the method that worked for us training our children. Not to give too much away, it’s not rocket science and if we can do it, you can too.