10 old-time products that make green and healthy sense today

Not all new products represent progress (I'm looking at you, Slap Chop). As wetry to learn how to live in harmony with our environment, we've come to a new appreciation of some old-time products and practices that still make sense today.Here are 10 examples.

1. Cloth diapers. The straight poop is, many mothers are returning from the wasteland of disposable diapers and using new versions of the old standby, cloth diapers. And these can be as good for your wallet as they are for Mother Earth: According to Time magazine, the overall cost for using these new diapers can be as little as a tenth of the cost of disposables.

While disposable diapers freed generations of moms from diaper laundry, they quickly began clogging landfills. According to recent estimates, we use an estimated 27.4 billion disposables a year. Just how much is this? A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that you could build 4,610 Washington Monuments with our dirty disposables every year.

For many years, the only alternative to the highway-decorating disposables was the traditional cotton nappy, which was difficult to clean and didn't retain fluids very well. Now, however, a new generation of designer diapers has provided clever answers to those shortcomings, resulting in more happy babies and happy eco-warriors. Cotton has been replaced with super-absorbent and durable microfibers, and safety pins with snaps or Velcro; the outside now comes in snazzy colors other than white. They also launder very well.

If you're looking for a way to return to an old-time product in a new form that's cheaper, healthier and more ecologically sound, this is it.