Even though most of us have plenty of cloth kitchen towels and colorful dish sponges around, the allure of paper towels is irresistible — whether you accidentally spill wine on your carpet or your pet leaves you a surprise in the living room, paper towels are great precisely because you don’t have to reuse them.
But we all know paper towels are bad for the environment and create a lot of paper waste — they’re single-use, often chemically bleached, and made out of trees via a chemical-laden process. The New York Times reported at one point that, “Rob Gogan, the recycling and waste manager at Harvard University, estimated that paper towels often account for 20 to 40 percent of waste (by volume) from an office building or a dorm.” And Stanford Magazine published this statistic from 2017: “Paper towels command a $2.5 billion industry and Americans use 270 million trees’ worth of them each year.”
If you’re looking to be a better friend to the environment — but you really want to keep that paper towel option open — reusable paper towels are going to be your new best friends for the majority of messes that need wiping up.