Green Alternatives to Paper Towels
Green Forest Paper Towels, White, 10 3 Roll Packs (30 Rolls)
I was in a BJ’s (giant box store) yesterday and stopped to consider their display of paper products. They have an enormous display of various brands of huge packs of 30 or so rolls of paper towels for ridiculously cheap prices. Needless to say it’s a popular item as busy people are lured by the convenience of using paper towels. Almost every cleaning task imaginable is now commonly used with paper products; from drying your hands, wiping the counter, floor, windows and pretty much anything else. As they are so cheap, many people mindlessly use them for everything and then just toss it.
It wasn’t that long ago you that people didn’t use paper towels, they used linens in the kitchen. They used a cloth for washing the dishes and yet another for wiping up counters. A hand towel in the kitchen for drying your freshly washed hands. Old rags could be used in a mop head. Cloth napkins. Newspapers for washing windows. All of them washed and reused time after time. It worked just fine for centuries.
We chop down forests for paper to blow our noses when those very forests are an important means to reduce global warming and to help keep the eco-system in balance. Here is a great site that discusses the Kleercut campaign to protect ancient Boreal forests from corporations destroying them to make kleenex and the like.
The insanity of chopping down old growth forests to make paper towels, napkins, tissues, etc should be banned. In the mean time we should either use reusable clothes for cleaning with or only buying the most environmentally responsible brands of paper towels, napkins, etc.
The best rated brands of paper towels include Seventh Generation paper products which use 100% total recycled paper and 90% post-consumer content. Other good brands include Planet(100% / 80%), Green Forest (100% / 40%) and Marcal (100% / 40-60%)
Scroll down this article to the bottom for more thorough table that shows more brands and info.
Blow your nose the old fashioned way and be on the cutting edge at the same time, with these organic unbleached cotton cloth hankies from Greenpeace, Support a leading environmentalist group and help yourself and the planet at the same time. Pack of three $10.00 CDN Greenpeace Shopping
