Earth Girls Are Easy: Paper Towel Challenge
March 19, 2009 by nina
Filed under Earth Girls Are Easy
Paper Towel Challenge
Sophie says:
In an effort to reduce my waste and save some trees, I began a Paper Towel Challenge in January. My long term goal is to be completely paper towel free, but right now I’m just going for less dependent. On average, my household was using one paper towel roll every two to three days.
That's how we rolled!
Now ten weeks into the challenge, one roll lasts us eleven days! Did I mention that I’m doing this challenge with… myself? That is, up until now.
Nina says:
I really don’t want to do this. I love paper towels! When I told Kali this she asked, “But don’t you love trees more?” No. No, I don’t. I don’t like trees. I don’t like outside. I don’t like leaving the house. But, fine. I’ll try it. Because this isn’t about me. It’s about the planet I’m leaving my children, and my children’s children, etc., etc., so forth, and so on.
Do you want to know how I got roped into this?
One day, a few months ago, Sophie and I were chatting on the phone. She was going through her budget/grocery spreadsheet thing-a-majig, and lamenting on how much paper towel they were using.
I was on the sofa, just finishing up a peanut butter sandwich that had been resting on a piece of paper towel. As we talked, one my boobs began to leak. I folded the paper towel into a square and tucked it into my bra.
“Sophie! I just reused!”
I gave her the details.
“First of all, you nasty. Secondly, why are you using a paper towel for your sandwich? Why not a plate?”
“That’s what they’re for! I don’t want to ‘waste’ a plate.”
Hee-hee
Then she explained the challenge…
Sophie says…
For me, it was just about using less. The day the light bulb went off, I had just witnessed my husband use THREE paper towels to sop up less than a ¼ cup of spilled orange juice.
When my mom would come over she would always put the snack on a paper towel, using Nina’s line, she didn’t want to “waste a plate.” Um, how is it wasting if you wash it? It’s the traditional reusable item. Ya use it, and ya wash it and ya use it again!
I decided then and there that I was going to crack down on paper towel usage. My husband’s not slow, really he’s not, but I had to remind him over and over again that we were doing this challenge… together… as a family. That means you can’t use four paper towels to line a plate to cook bacon in the microwave. You don’t have to use half a roll to clean the baby’s potty (even if it is a poopy one). And last but not least, you can not use paper towels for this…
Look Ma, no trees!
… no matter how funny it is.
How I Cut Back on Paper Towel Usage:
1) I use rags made from old towels to clean up spills around the house.
2) I also use these rags for cleaning counters, sinks, tables, etc.
3) I use paper towels, sparingly.
Another way to help is to buy paper products (toilet paper included) with recycled content and post-consumer fibers. Also, look for paper products that are unbleached or chlorine-free since the bleaching process requires toxic chemicals that eventually end up in our air and water.
“If every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll of 120 ct. virgin-fiber paper towels with our 100% recycled ones, we could save 1,000,000 trees.” -Seventh Generation
So before you do this…
Hold it, hold it...
think about it. Maybe you can use something else to clean up that mess. Think about how many rolls you go through a week and just try to decrease it a bit. So far 11 days has been my best. I’m still working on it though. How many rolls do you use a week? Any ideas for alternatives to paper towels? And how ’bout we all chip in and buy Nina some breastpads??
Nina says…
That ain’t funny.
So, what tips do you have to use less paper towels? How many rolls do you go through a week? Care to take the challenge?
Nina is a 34-year-old mother, wife and writer who spends her days blogging, studying, changing diapers and watching ridiculous amounts of TV. She currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, two children and three TiVos.
I have been thinking about this myself. My family uses a lot more, and I think I am the worst one. We got a lot of dish towels as part of Christmas gifts, and a lot of other things can be done with reusable sponges that I would use paper towels for. This would be difficult for me personally, but I think too the money saved would be, not to mention the waste and such as well.
Forgot to mention dish towels. Those have been very helpful as well.
I’m the biggest culprit too. It’s hard habit to break. I reach for a paper towel for everything!
WOW..I can make a three pack last MONTHS!!! Mostly b/c I forget that they are there and will grab a regular towel. SO..there it is…the one way I am helping save the planet!! lol
Go Cassie!
I think I’m gonna have to just buy one roll and see how long it lasts. Then refuse to buy another. We get huge multi-packs from Sam’s Club so that doesn’t help. We have a few rolls left from the last buy. I’ll have to make those stretch.
just don’t buy any paper towels. Buy dish towels (rags. Hang them on the stove handle. The fridge handle. On top of the fridge. Wipe wet hands in the towel. Use one to wipe wet counter tops. Just remember to was them regular or they will get germy.
I made this a personal challenge about a year ago.
I went to the automotive department at Wal-Mart and bought two 24 packs of microfiber shop rags. They were like 5 bucks a pack. (If you buy microfiber rags in the cleaning aisle they are 10 times more expensive.)
Microfiber rags are the BOMB. You can clean up a LOT with one rag, and generally I don’t have to use any chemicals because they are so good at scrubbing. PLUS they are washable. (Just don’t use fabric softener because it reduces the absorbency of the rag.) I use about 10 rags a day doing various tasks around the house but I probably go through only one roll of paper towels over the course of two weeks, and that’s with a family of 5.(Before starting this challenge we were going through at least a roll a day.)
By reducing your reliance on paper towels you are not only saving the environment, but also saving a LOT of money. I used to use the expensive Viva paper towels. At about two bucks a roll, and going through 7 rolls a week that’s 14 bucks a week. That’s a whopping 700 bucks a year on paper towels!!(that may be a slight exaggeration but you get my point.)
My kids use the most paper towels out of anyone in the house although they are getting better. The only thing I use them at all for anymore is cleaning up cat vomit. With 4 cats it happens around here, and I ain’t cleaning up cat throw up with my rags and then washing them. I draw the line right there.
The only thing left for me to work on green wise is going off the grid. When we build our house we are planning on installing a full solar power system so that will take care of that.
Great Post!!
Wow, girl! You are really doing it!
I want Sham-Wows!
Don’t waste your money, I bought some and they were NOTHING like in the commercial. Every time I see that guy yelling on TV I’m wondering if he’s deaf and that’s why he has to yell like that. Trust me, if there’s an infomercial product out there I have tried it. I am the infomercial queen. I can tell you honestly that the ONLY infomercial product I have purchased that I actually think was worth the money was the Swivel Sweeper. That thing is THE BOMB!
WHY WOULD A DEAF PERSON NEED TO YELL?!?!?!?!
LMAO! Good point!
They tested Sham-Wow yesterday or the day before on Good Morning America. They did not stand up to the test.
Aww we like our Sham-Wow
Granted, we put it in a bowl of water and it didn’t get all of it and it did drip, but we like it for smaller spills.
I think they’re probably good for everyday use and better than a paper towel or rag. They just don’t match the inflated claims of the commercials.
I just wanted to weigh in on the Sham-Wow debate:
As much as I want to punch the spokesguy in the face, it does work pretty well. Granted, I’m sure it doesn’t work to the point of the commercial, i.e. soaking up a bowl of water, etc., but it does sop up a full beer that my niece knocked over as soon as I opened it on Christmas day at my dad’s house. Also, my dad and stepmom have a new puppy who they are desperately trying to housebreak, and they use one to sop up the “accidents”. I’ve sopped up one of Darla’s accidents while over there, and can vouch for it.
We recently bought some sham wows and I just really can’t see that they work that well. I thought I saw on the commercial (or somewhere…) that you could dry pets really good with them. We tried it….didn’t work worth a poot. I had such high hopes for them too. Especially for the pet drying thing. Do they work well with drying a vehicle? Does anyone know?
Thanks Cat, for providing reason # 73 why my daughter will not be getting a cat. I think I need one of your microfiber rags to clean up MY vomit.
In my house (me, my sister, and her son) we probably go through less than one roll a week. PLATES FTW!
KeMari and I have decided that FTW is a take on WTF and so every time I see it, I think, “Fuck the what?!”
Now, what did you mean by it? LOL
For The Win! lolz
Boo@ For The Win.
Yay @ Fuck the What?!
That’s what I’d originally thought it meant too. Before I was enlightened.
Wow Sophie, this one is going to be very hard for me. I use paper towels for EVERYTHING. I use two just to eat with (one in the lap and one on the side), little spills always get more paper towel than necessary, and we keep them in the bathroom for after washing our hands. I know…. bad.
We did just recently get a Sham Wow, the thing is freaking awesome! Oh and I just bought a Swiffer duster thingy-ma-gig and use that to dust now instead of Windex-ing the living daylights out of everything.
It was really hard for my husband to get on board. I don’t think he even realized how dependent he was on paper towels, not to mention how many he’d use at a time. It was like, “Perforation, there’s a perforation?”
But everyday he got a little better about it, which is all I could ask. He does like how it lowered our grocery bill too!
P.S. What do you use to soak up the grease in food?
What do you mean? Like pizza?
OH, you mean like if you’re frying chicken or something? Well, personally I don’t fry — I oven bake, but if I did, it’d be a case where I’d use a paper towel. Not six like my husband used to, but maybe one or two.
Do I get a prize if we already do this?
*stands up and does a I-am-an-enviromental-supah-stah-armpit sniff*
Booyah!
Really, we’re just too poor to use paper towels.
No, but really-really, we try to be environmentally kind and it usually translates into saving money.
We don’t use paper towels. Me, my husband, and my sister-in-law all live here and we decided to go green when our electric bill got ridiculous. We’ve brought it down $70! We use the energy saving lightbulbs, and unplug everything except the tv and its devices, and our computers. Another thing I stopped doing was buying those plug-in air fresheners. I used to be obsessed with them, and had one in every room. Turns out, each one was raising my bill about $8. Im the worst one about paper towels though, and mostly I don’t use them because we really cant afford them. When I did buy them, I bought the 3 pack of the Viva ones, my Kleenex. They’re so thick that you can use less and they last a long time. Right now we just use dish towels(I got so many at my wedding shower, I ended up giving several away) and sponges.
I never thought of the plug-in air fresheners affecting your bill. I used to be obsessed with them too.
I love Viva!!! Thats all we buy and it totally does cut down on the usage, esp. for spills.
I buy Viva papertowels and Scott tissue, so that both of those last longer than normal.
I agree. When I used paper towels Viva was soooooooo thick. You could probably rinse the thing and use it again.
My mom always had old socks under the sink to use for dusting and cleaning. It was nice because you could stick your hand in the foothole and use it like a glove.
Good idea! Donny has plenty that can help the cause.
I’m pretty lazy about buying paper towels, so we’ll go a month or two without them, and then when we get them, we waste the crap out of them. But I like to think I counteract that with the months in between when I don’t buy any.
I use the kids old t-shirts that they grow out of (and they grow out of them fast). For nose-blowing and such, I use toilet paper and (i forget where i read this) I have started throwing my snot rags in the bathroom trash instead of flushing them because I read that that extra flush uses x amount of water, and if everyone would try to flush less and throw snot rags in the trash instead of toilet, they would save so much water, etc.
I have bought about 6 reusable shopping bags, but have forgotten to take them with me when I go shopping. So I end up buying more when I’m out.
But we are big time users of plastic shopping bags because we have dogs. I don’t know how to get us out of this, as it is the best thing we can use. I hate that we even use plastic shopping bags, but dear lord, picking up dog poop with anything else sucks!
Sophie, you need to be writing a book!
I think one suggestion from our EGAE blog about plastic bags, was to save the bags that your cereal is in inside the box. You buy the cereal anyway. When you’re done, start saving that bag instead of throwing it away with the box. You can use those for doggie poop pick-up.
Ooooh good idea. I forgot about that. I’ll go one farther and save potato chip bags too! Yay
Why would you have potato chips, heifer?
LMFAO. Damn, I totally walked right into that one, didn’t I? FTW?
I already failed at this
http://mainepets.mainetoday.com/blogentry.html?id=10962
impossible with pets and kids
My poor daughter is never getting a pet.
I use bar mops. You can get them at BB&Beyond, or any restaurant supply shop, and probably online. They are thick towels that bartenders use to mop up spills. I learned to use them when I worked in a private club. Use them like towels when cooking or baking and whenever something spills just mop it up. They’re bleachable, and even if they stain (grape juice) who cares? They used to come 6 to a pack for about 6-10 bucks, but I haven’t bought any in a few years. They make another kind that are thin, but they are more for drying glasses lint free. You want to get the white terry kind. I’d be lost without them.
that’s funny, I never have paper towels in my home. Ever. Once I had a roommate who liked to use them, I guess because her family had money to throw away when she was growing up, but mine never did.
In my house now I just have no use for them. We have a nice big stack of dish towels on hand at all times. As long as nothing besides water gets on the dish towels they do not need to be washed (within reason). To wipe up spills we use one of the cloths or sponges that are always sitting on the sink. Windows are cleaned with a sponge or cloth and soapy water, then wiped down with a clean, dry dish towel (no streaking, ever). There is no cleaning job in my home that cannot be performed with a sponge, cloth, scourer, vaccum cleaner or scrubber.
Using paper towels does not even occur to me.
My dream…
I agree. I got the same plan. lol Don’t use paper towels.
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about how many paper towels and paper plates we use. I told her I was feeling bad that we were killing trees because I was too lazy to do dishes more often. Then I told her, but if I do more dishes then I am just wasting more water, so which is worse? I loved her answer, they are both renewable resources and making the products gives people jobs, so I shouldn’t worry about it either way. I’m lazy, so this rationale works great for me.
Sorry Ma Earth, versatility wins with me. Paper Towels are akin to duct tape for me. I’ll just pitch in elsewhere.
I appreciate your candor, and now I know where to go when I want to get my paper towel/duct tape fix.
How does your Mum not have internet access if she is living at your house?
One paper towel roll in our house lasts for months, cos I forget it exists… we always used chux wipes as kids and wash them… so thats what I use now.
Nina and I co-wrote this blog. I wrote that section.
This is sophistry made into art. Anyone who thinks reducing paper towel use is somehow saving the planet is a moron who understands absolutely nothing about the paper industry. People who engage in this kind of nonsense are laboring under the delusion that paper pulp companies like International are logging old growth forest, which is utterly false.
The pulp companies now own and maintain their very own private forests where they grow pines whose sole purpose is to be harvested for pulp. When the trees are harvested, they are immediately replanted and left alone to reach maturity, at which point the cycle begins anew. Drive through east Texas, for instance, and you will find plots of pines in various stages of maturity, plus active planting sites where trees have recently been harvested.
Additionally, paper towels typically contain a large amount of post consumer recycled content, so the argument can definitely be made that by reducing command for that particular commodity, you are actually HARMING the environment. When the commodity price on paper scrap drops, large paper consumers like commercial printing facilities have less of an incentive to sell their scrap to recycling companies.
So go ahead and use less paper towels if it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but please do not delude yourself into believing you are somehow saving the planet.
*reducing DEMAND
You don’t have to be insulting. You don’t have to call her names. If you can’t make your point without doing so, don’t comment at all. I’m deleting all comments like that.
I don’t have to explain my environmental stewardship accomplishments to you, Nina, because I know you know them. So it irritates the ever loving SHIT out of me when well-meaning but poorly-informed suburbanites dub themselves environmental gurus and saviors of the planet, then go to the mat for their erroneous, logically flawed and intellectually inept beliefs.
She never dubbed herself a guru, just someone trying to do their part. If you don’t agree, or have better/more information to share, then do so. But you can do that without calling her a moron. That’s uncalled for, and it distracts from anything positive you’re saying because all your good points are in cloud of douchery.
I don’t see how reducing my waste is a bad thing. I’m not going to put the paper towel business under. At the very least, I am reducing my trash and my “contribution” to the landfills. Where do these paper towels go after they are used and discarded? I can’t recycle them. I can’t compost them.
I never claimed to be a guru. I am just doing what I think is best for me and mine (which includes the planet).
*shrug* At least he called me well meaning.
We have paper towels and they last a long time. We mainly use them for cooking, e.g., bacon in micro, etc. I also use napkins. We use a “lot” of dish towels. And we use old baby cloth diapers/bibs as rags for wiping spills, polishing granite countertops, etc.
One pet peeve: If you are at work. Ask your person who buys the white paper towels for the dispensers to switch to the brown towels. Use unbleached and/or chlorine free paper products [copy paper, paper towels, coffee filters, etc.]. This might be your property manager who does this in the common area restrooms. One co-worker wears a towel on his pants (I know…hey, it works for some).
Another thing is paper plates. At work, we bought dishes and utensils. Every little bit helps. It’s hard to adjust sometimes. Use less paper products when you can.
I haven’t bought paper towels in years.
Not cause I want to save the planet, but because I’m too cheap.
They are a waste! I bought a 4 pack of microfiber clothes from Dollar General for less than $3. These clothes are pretty big, so what I did was I cut 2 of them into quarters. Perfect sizes for cleaning up counter tops, tabletops, and basically everything else. We even use them when hand washing our dishes.
I left 2 full sized cloths intact for larger uses such as spills and mopping the floor. Yep, mopping the floor! Instead of buying the refills for my swiffer sweeper, I tuck in a microfiber cloth that I’ve dipped in soapy water and rung out.
Microfiber is the BOMB. Great investment.
Toss ‘em in the washer when they get nasty, just don’t forget NOT to use fabric softener or dryer sheets when you wash & dry them – if you use them to clean windows & mirrors the fabric softener will make them leave behind streaks. Boo!
OK, I’m sold. I’m gonna get me some of those! LOL
OMG, I posted before reading your comments, and I SO DID NOT just copy off Cat! I swear!!! Holy “the BOMB” crap! Wow.
Cat, you must be my long lost twin sister for us to be on the same mind meld here. Whoaaaaaa…
Okay – off to read the rest of the comments.
‘I don’t like trees. I don’t like outside. I don’t like leaving the house.’
Woulda fell off my chair laughing if my fat butt wasn’t wedged in it!!
I use about one roll every 3-4 days I think. I use sandwich bags for my fella’s lunch sandwiches and as he has oozy cheese spread I wrap them up in paper towels before putting them in the bag. I also use paper towels for cleaning my kitchen worktops, with anti-bacterial spray. I’m a bit germ-phobic and tend to avoid using cloths, but I have a perfectly good washing machine so I may try cutting up some rags myself and using them.
Never heard of sham wow. lol
I use dish towels. Regular dish towels to wipe off counter tops and such. I wash the dishtowels and reuse. Easy.
I only use one roll every couple of months… but I’m single… and I don’t like to use paper towels.
I prefer to use sponges for clean-ups and for “messes”, I use ordinary towels and wash them.
I even use linen napkins instead of paper ones… and wash them.
This may be one of the biggest areas that I’m a green person on… because I like trees.. I like them a lot… ;o)