Teatowels

Use cloth tea towels in the kitchen instead of paper towels.

Next time you need to buy paper towels, buy a big bunch of cloth tea towels instead. I have 10 and even if I use 1 a day, I still have 3 spare to tide me over til after wash-day.

• Easier: the cloth towels can absorb as much as paper towels, but they won’t disintegrate when you wring them out, so you can keep mopping up whatever has just taken a hit.
  Also, as ever, you now have 1 less thing to buy at the shop, and man are paper towels bulky to bring home!
• Cheaper: average, decent quality 4 roll pack here in Istanbul is about a tenner. I might use about 2 rolls a month. = 60 quid a year.
  My cloth teatowels were 20 quid for ten.
  They’ll be decent for at least 2 years (they’ll last way longer but lets judge it by how long they stay “new looking”) = 10 quid a year.
  That’s 6 times cheaper!
• More stylish: It’s basically loo roll for your kitchen… not chic at all. Much better to have a fabric/design/ colour that you love or makes you smile. I LOVE me yellow ones.
• Fight the power! Have you ever watched a TV commercial for paper towels? every single one is trying to convince us of the convenience of paper towels,  and sell it to us by extolling virtues that you would definitely find…In you guessed it… A cloth tea towel! These advertisers and companies are creating a demand for their own product. Don’t let them, you don’t need to line their pockets with money and line the earth with rubbish.
• Bonus: if you don’t have any teatowels what can your kids tie around their head at the school nativity when they get cast as Shepherd #23?

THE IMPACT IT’S HAVING

Paper towels and napkins are not recyclable: their cellulose structure is not strong enough to be remade into anything, and they are usually dirty with food, which contaminates the material. Far better to compost them apparently, something I’ve only recently found out. So get yourself some cotton or linen tea towels ready for when you run out of your paper kitchen towel. I have it on good authority from Jennifer of Jennifer’s Hamam, that linen is more absorbent than cotton. Ideally you might want organic linen but it’s not widely available, however organic cotton is… so take your pick. If you want absorbency…go linen. If you want to support organic farming, go organic cotton. Either way, give up the disposable paper towels.