SAVE MONEY: DITCH PAPER TOWELS!

By Contributing Editor Chris Clark

Once you begin to make changes to be more eco-friendly in your life you will begin to notice a lot of disposable things you didn’t even realize that you use. The paper coffee cup now and then, the sandwich bags when packing a lunch and the paper towels. If you aren’t using paper towels made from 100% post-consumer recycled paper, know that trees are being cut down to make them.

Try Skoy Cloths
According to GreenSeal’s Choose Green Report:

“Every ton of 100% recycled paper saves an estimated 4,100 kilowatt-hours of energy, 7,000 gallons of water and 60 pounds of air pollutants. If all paper towels were made with 100% recycled materials, approximately 1 million tons of used paper would be kept out of our waste stream.” (http://www.greenseal.org/resources/reports/CGR_tissuetowel.pdf)

That doesn’t even count the amount of trees that are cut down to make the virgin paper that we use to wipe up spills.

Organic Hemp Wash Cloths are long lasting and easy to clean as well as being made from incredibly sustainable hemp.
So, how can you go paper towel free at home, or at least lower the amount of paper towels that you use? It’s really quite easy. First you need to think about what you use paper towels for and then make sure you have suitable, reusable replacements.

If you use paper towels to dry your hands, you will want to make sure you have cloth towels near where you normally wash your hands. If you use them to wipe up spills, make sure you have rags or cloth towels that can be stained that are easy to grab when there has been a spill. Keep a pile of small cotton or hemp towels in a drawer for these occasions.

Consider Skoy Cloths as an alternative

I’ll share what has worked at my house and maybe some of the ideas will work for you. All of the nice kitchen towels, those that match the kitchen or were made by me, are on one shelf. These are typically used for drying hands or dishes, covering rising bread or other relatively clean jobs.

In a basket on the counter there are a pile of skoy cloths and hemp towels. These are for soaking up big spills, wiping down counters or dirty cleaning jobs. I keep a bucket in the laundry room and dump the dirty towels in, along with cloth napkins and tablecloths. When the bucket is full it all gets washed.

When I am cooking something fried, instead of draining it on paper towels, I use newspapers or just a cooling rack on the counter.

I have found that a kitchen sponge and some skoy cloths are great tools for scrubbing any sticky spots that show up on the kitchen counters and the skoy cloth also soak up a ton of liquid if there has been a spill.

Hemp Scrub Cloths are reusable and long lasting

We do keep a roll of paper towels under the sink just in case we find we really need it for some kind of emergency, but overall we haven’t really missed them in the kitchen. If you are prepared, giving up paper towels is not really all that difficult and can be another step in repairing our environment.