My goal is to never buy another roll of paper towel.

When a friend a few years ago told me about a relative of hers no longer using paper towel, I didn’t give it much thought. Well, really, I thought it would be impossible.

Eliminating paper towels is good for the earth. (Image: Kathryn Reed)

Now I wonder what all I was using paper towels for that I didn’t think I could live without them. My guess is I could have been using a rag instead of a paper towel.

That’s exactly what I do today. In fact, a book I recently read (it may have been Wallet Activism) as well as other articles talked about how paper towels are so environmentally bad. Plus, they are a waste of money.

I learned I could cut up old T-shirts to use in place of paper towel.

When I started paying attention to my paper towel consumption I realized it was mostly to clean something off the floor; in particular when I Swifter the floor I would use a damp paper towel to pick up the remnants. Now I use a swatch of old T-shirt.

I keep the cut up T-shirt squares (well, they are really haphazard sizes because I don’t cut straight) in a pile under the sink. This makes them easily accessible—just like the paper towel.

I then hang the damp cloth over the dirty clothes basket, wash it with all my clothes, and put it back under the sink to be used again.

On occasion I have used paper towel to cover a dish in the microwave so the sauce doesn’t spray all over. The T-shirt has worked for this endeavor as well. Though, I will admit I choose cloth that has not been used before because some of the T-shirt pieces are no longer pristine. This would make it seem less like putting a rag, which essentially is what some of the T-shirt pieces have become, on food.

Fortunately, however I’m cooking these days I’m not making as much food that might splatter, or I’m using deeper dishes to reheat it in. So now I seldom need to cover something in the microwave.

The bonus to using old T-shirts in this manner is they are being repurposed instead of ending up in the landfill even sooner.

The other thing I would use paper towel for was a holder for food, like toast. Now I put the avocado toast on a regular plate. Nothing goes in the garbage this way.

The inability to recycle paper towel is another big reason to say no to this product. I had no idea I should always be tossing them in the trash and not the recycling bin. Of the handful of recycling websites I went to they all said paper towels cannot be recycled, though the cardboard tube they are spooled on can be.

“Unused paper towels cannot be recycled because the fibers are too short to be made into new paper. Used paper towels also cannot be recycled because they are usually soiled with food or grease, which contaminate the recycling process,” according to Napa Recycling and Waste Services website.

If you aren’t convinced yet to give up paper towels, here are some stats from the Paperless Project:

• As many as 51,000 trees per day are required to replace the number of paper towels that are discarded every day.
• If every household in the U.S. used just one less 70-sheet roll of paper towels, that would save 544,000 trees each year.
• To make 1 ton of paper towels (which is roughly 2,000 roles) it takes 17 trees and 20,000 gallons of water.
• People in the U.S. use more than 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year and that number is growing steadily.
• Globally, discarded paper towels result in 254 million tons of trash every year.
• If every household in the U.S. used three less rolls per year, it would save 120,000 tons of waste and $4.1 million in landfill dumping fees.