Advice

Environment, money and, most importantly, health!

Environment:

Disposables take up to 500 years to fully decompose in the earth, meaning that almost every disposable ever made still exists in landfill somewhere.
Around 4% of all household waste is made up of disposable nappies.
The average baby would get through around 4,500 nappies from birth to potty.
In the UK alone, there are 63 million disposables sent to landfill each week.
A few dozen cloth nappies being washed regularly compared to 4,500 nappies and associated packaging being transported to the shops and then home and then to landfill has got to make sense.
4,500 disposable nappies PER CHILD, versus a few dozen cloth nappies FOR SEVERAL CHILDREN!

Money:

Even if you choose the most expensive cloth nappy system and decide to buy lots of them to save on washing it will be considerably cheaper than buying 4,500 disposable nappies - and that is just for one child - take into account the fact that with most cloth nappies you can use them for subsequent children and the savings really mount up.
You may even find they have a re-sale value once your child(ren) has grown out of them...you definitely can't say that about disposables.

Health:

Disposables are made of chemically treated wood fibres, bleached with chlorine. It is believed that organochlorides linger in small quantities in the nappy; these have been associated with birth defects, miscarriage, cancer and genetic damage. Nobody actually knows if organochlorides in disposables can cause a problem to the child's health.
Disposables are very absorbent due to a substance found in the fluffy layers of the nappy that turn your baby's urine into gel. This substance has been associated with toxic shock syndrome and also with causing severe nappy rash and causing bleeding to the delicate tissue as it draws liquid so strongly.
It is difficult to find any unbiased studies into the effects of these chemicals on your baby's health, but why take the risk?