by Tao Oliveto, Carrboro, NC

Speaking of the good ol’ days, remember when people carried handkerchiefs? Me either, actually, but doesn’t it sound like a great idea? Americans don’t seem like an especially tidy bunch by the look of our littered parks, parking lots and highways, but we certainly love our paper napkins and towels! Give a guy a cup of coffee to go and he’ll grab 5 or 7 of them to take along. That $4 latte? It may just include a little napkin subsidizing.

Ironically, it gets worse in places like Whole Foods food and salad bars, where a soup and a hummus plate seem to require handfuls of napkins. Add kids to the mix, and you’ve practically felled a tree. I’d call this an exaggeration, but when it comes down to the math, sadly, it’s not. According to Ideal Bite, Americans use approximately 2,200 paper napkins per person per year.

Public restrooms. Paper towels. Same problem. Which brings up another distant memory - those blowers that dry your hands after washing in restrooms. They require electricity, so the solution wasn’t and isn’t perfect (at least until alter-power kicks into high gear), but somehow, they seem like a good trade-off to the piles of paper used up and thrown out daily.

Solutions? Here you go: Take only what you need. Use sparingly. Move more slowly (less spills). And, last but not least, BYO! Although I appreciate knowing a few new and cool companies are providing vintage, hemp and organic alternatives to the paper stuff (see Ideal Bite link) for home use, you don’t need a trip to a kitchen store to go reusable. Cut up old fabric, t-shirts or towels into nice neat squares. If you want to be fancy about it, get out the tye dye - wait a minute - I don’t remember, was that stuff toxic?

Tags: culture, home

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Green Misc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.