Thrift Week 2019, Day 2: Non-paper products

Continuing with my Thrift Week series on reusable alternatives to disposable stuff, I'd like to talk a bit about paper products—or rather, the lack thereof.

Pretty much the only disposable paper product we use in our home is toilet paper. There are people out there who have replaced even this with reusable alternatives, such as a bidet or "family cloth," a euphemism for reusable tush wipes. However, as I discussed in my TP tracking article, the amount of amount we could save with these alternatives is so small compared to the hassle involved that I've never seriously considered them. (And anyway, the flushed paper just goes into our sewage sludge, which typically gets used as fertilizer—so in a sense, it's being recycled.)

Most Americans, however, use a lot more paper products than this. Here's a rundown of the products that mainstream Americans use and we don't, what we use instead, and how much we're saving by doing so.

Paper Napkins

Last spring, I was quite pleased to see a headline suggesting that Millennials, among their many other crimes, were "killing" paper napkins. I assumed this meant that, like us, they were using cloth napkins instead, which not only look nicer but also cost less in the long run. However, to my disappointment, this turned out not to be what Gen-Yers are doing at all; instead they're just setting their tables with paper towels. After all, they're basically the same thing, and paper towels are cheaper, so why buy two separate products?

My response to this is, okay, but why buy even one? Swapping out paper napkins for paper towels may be cheaper, but you're still using something once and throwing it away. At our house, we use only cloth napkins, which are significantly cheaper. True, each cloth napkins costs more up front than a single paper one, but most of the cloth napkins we use every day were gifts from relatives; we also have some that we bought for larger parties, but these cost no more than a dollar apiece. So even up front, a set of four cloth napkins doesn't really cost any more than a jumbo-pack of paper ones.

However, the real savings come from the ongoing costs. Since we each reuse the same napkin until it gets dirty enough to need a wash, we only wash an average of one to two napkins per week, which adds up to maybe one extra load of laundry per year. And according to Michael Bluejay's laundry calculator, that single load costs us about 40 cents. By contrast, using paper napkins at every meal would cost us around $35 a year. (See my Money Crashers piece on green living for more details on these calculations.)

At that rate, even if we had to buy all our cloth napkins new, they'd pay for themselves in a matter of weeks. I can't calculate exactly how much we save over the course of each napkin's lifetime because, to be honest, I'm not sure what a cloth napkin's lifetime is; even the oldest ones we own are nowhere near wearing out.

And, of course, we're also not tossing over two thousand soiled paper napkins into a landfill every year. (I guess you could always compost them instead, but you'd be at risk of overflowing your bin pretty quickly.)

Paper Towels

Another reason we would never considering paper towels in place of napkins, as our Millennial friends do, is that we don't have paper towels in the house. In fact, the only time we've ever had any paper towels in this house was when we first moved in and my in-laws bought three rolls of them, along with various other cleaning supplies, to get the place spic-and-span. I think it took us over five years to use them all up.

What we use for everyday cleaning is cloth rags. These cost us nothing, as we make them ourselves by tearing up old socks and T-shirts when they're so worn out they can no longer reasonably be repaired. In the kitchen, we keep them in a plastic dispenser from IKEA, originally designed for storing plastic bags for reuse, which we've bolted to the inside of the cabinet door under the sink. We just stuff freshly washed ones in at the top and pull them out as needed.

When they start to look too ratty and dingy for use in the kitchen, we downgrade them to "shop rags," which we store in the workshop for cleaning. If we ever use these to clean up a particularly nasty mess, we can just toss the entire rag in the trash, as you would do with a paper towel, without guilt. However, we don't have to do this very often, so we produce significantly less waste with these rags than we would by using and discarding a paper towel every time we want to clean something up. (I'm not sure how many rags we actually discard or wear out in the course of a typical year, but I know that it's fewer than we produce as our shirts and socks wear out. And since those worn-out clothes would probably just end up in the landfill if we didn't turn them into rags, you could argue that we're producing no additional waste at all this way—we're just keeping our clothes out of the waste stream a little longer.)

I've never counted how many rags we actually go through in a week, but whenever we do a load of laundry, it typically contains half a dozen or so. If we do a load of laundry each week on average, that means we're using about six rags per week. Furthermore, most of those get used two or three times before going into the laundry, since they can hold a lot more liquid than a paper towel. So those six rags are probably taking the place of around 15 paper towels, which would add up to around 780 paper towels per year—about three-quarters of this $10 12-pack from Staples. So that's about $7.50, minus, say, $1.20 for an extra three loads or so of laundry, for a net savings of $6.30 per year.

In short, using rags in place of paper towels isn't saving us nearly as much as using cloth napkins. But on the other hand, it's really no more work, and it might save as much as one whole tree every year for all those paper towels we're not using. So really, what's the downside?

Tissues

The most controversial non-paper product we use is cloth handkerchiefs. This often gets a reaction of "Ewwww," even from people who are otherwise environmentally conscious. But should it, really?

According to an analysis by ABC Australia, disposable tissues are "likely" more hygienic than reusable hankies when you have a cold, if—and this is key—you not only dispose of them immediately after use, but also go and wash your hands right afterwards. But how many people really do this? If you have a really serious cold, one that has you sneezing or blowing your nose every minute, following these rules would mean not only going through several whole boxes of tissues a day, but also washing your hands dozens of times every hour. I don't know anyone who actually does this—and if you don't, the experts say, there's no difference between tissues and hankies. (It also bears noting that if you don't have a cold, but are sneezing or sniffling due to allergies, germs are not an issue, and there's no advantage to using tissues at all.)

However, for those who are still freaked out about germs, there is a product out there that claims to solve the problem. The Hankybook is a set of eight organic cotton "pages" sewn into a sturdy cloth cover, which protects your hands from contact with any germs so that you won't spread them to other surfaces. They cost about $8 apiece, while plain cotton hankies from Target cost only $5 for a set of six—but then, one HankyBook can really take the place of up to eight plain hankies, and they're organic to boot.

Whichever type you buy, it'll definitely be cheaper than disposable tissues. A 120-count box of Kleenex costs $1.59 at Target, which is a little over a penny a pop. That doesn't seem like much until you think about how many of those things you can go through with one cold, or on a bad day during allergy season. I did a quick search and found that Statista puts typical tissue use in the U.S. at two boxes per person per month, which works out to $38 a year. Meanwhile, our plain old cheap hankies from the dollar store merely produce maybe three loads of laundry per year, costing $1.20 for the two of us. (And yes, the experts at ABC Australia say washing your handkerchiefs with your regular laundry is quite sufficient to get them clean and germ-free—no need to use a special "sanitize" cycle or even hot water.)

I should note that, for the convenience of guests in our home, we do keep one box of tissues in the kitchen. However, in Millennial-approved fashion, the box doesn't actually contain special "facial tissue" bought for the purpose; it's just a roll of toilet paper concealed in a nice holder.  

If you had to rank the non-paper products we use from most to least mainstream, the cloth napkins would probably be most normal, while the cloth cleaning rags would be most likely to rank as truly extreme. But if you think about it, they're all based on the same principle: it costs less to wash a piece of cloth than it does to buy and discard a piece of paper, and it produces less waste, too. Plus our cloth napkins and cloth handkerchiefs earn Miss Manners' seal of approval and make us look like much classier individuals than we really are.