When I first started making eco-friendly swaps in our house, one of the first things I tackled was our addiction to paper towels.
Is this a dramatic exaggeration? I honestly don’t think so.
Dinner time? We used paper towels as napkins.
Making a quick sandwich? Lunch on the go? Washing your hands? Wiping up tiny spills? Wiping up big spills?
You guessed it, we grabbed paper towels. Yikes.
I bought jumbo, warehouse-sized packs of paper towels 5 times in 2018. I purchased smaller 12 packs four times each in 2019 and 2020, only three times in 2021 and I haven’t bought any in 2022. I’m actually quite proud of this!
Are paper towels bad for the environment?
They’re definitely not good for the environment, that’s for sure. Similar to toilet paper, most paper towel manufacturing relies on virgin pulp, which contributes to deforestation. Making paper towels also requires a lot of water, up to 20,000 gallons of water to make one ton of paper towels.
And the United States, no surprise, is number one in global paper towel usage, with over 13 billion pounds of paper towels are used each year in America alone.
Some people make the argument that it takes more water to wash your rags than it does to produce paper towels, but it turns out that overall water usage is actually similar. In our house with two young boys, we’re running laundry frequently anyway, so it’s not creating any additional laundry to use dish towels.
Simple Eco Friendly Paper Towel Swaps:
-
- Dish towels – We use a ton of dish towels when drying dishes, washing and drying our hands, and cleaning up big spills. We keep these in easy-to-reach locations and have multiple spares in a convenient kitchen drawer. You want to make it so you reach for them over paper towels out of habit. Sometimes I use 2 or 3 a day if I’m cooking a big meal and cleaning my hands or wiping up spills often.
- Swedish dishcloths – These things are so cool and they’re made out of renewable materials. It’s been reported that one cloth replaces SEVENTEEN rolls of paper towels. They start hard, but once you wet them they become super absorbent. They’re great for wiping down counters quickly or tackling unidentified sticky residue. You hang them to dry, and they come in lots of cute prints to match any decor and they’re naturally antimicrobial. Plus, they’re compostable so once you’re done with them, you don’t have to worry about adding more to a landfill.
- Microfiber cloths – Instead of cleaning with paper towels, I almost exclusively clean with these cloths. You can buy them anywhere, but I picked up a big pack of them one day while I was at Target.
If you’re just starting on your journey of making more eco friendly swaps, I would suggest upcycling old t-shirts or rags to use for basic cleaning if you have them laying around. If you don’t have anything you can make use of, then I would suggest buying Swedish dishcloths over microfiber cloths since they’re super affordable, made of renewable materials, very durable, and biodegradable. I have had my microfiber cloths for a few years now, and there’s nothing wrong with them so I do use them a lot!
I do have a small stash of paper towels in my house left over from my last purchase. Sometimes the kids get sick, or the dog has an accident, and I prefer to use paper towels for that kind of a mess. When I need to replenish those, I will either purchase recycled or bamboo (tree-free) paper towels.