So, you’ve made the leap and ordered some un-paper towels. Or maybe you are considering doing so. Yay! Eliminating single-use paper products is one of the easiest and most cost-effective steps to take on one’s journey to a more sustainable lifestyle.
Storing and caring for this investment, however, seems to throw many people off their groove. Folks have a lot of questions about them, and that’s okay! No question is silly, and we’re happy to go over how to care for un-paper towels.
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How to Use Unpaper Towels
Use them just like regular paper towels. We use them predominantly for kitchen messes, sticky kiddo fingers, and drying hands.
Our laundry room is right off the kitchen. This makes it super easy to simply toss them straight into the washer. If that’s not convenient, a storage bin under the sink, or next to the trash and recycling bins might be an option.
Reneelynn and I have also started looking at purchasing a second set, as some of our current ones are getting pretty gross. We won’t toss the ones we have, but they’ll be downgraded to “Gross Things Rags” with all the t-shirt scraps. These rags are used specifically for cleaning pet messes, and really gross things like floors and bathrooms.
2022 Update: We did purchase a new set! The cactus towels below are still hanging on, but only as floor and pet mess rags. We went with an all-white set from Porter Lee’s this time.
2023 Update: We purchased another set from Porter Lee’s – this time an adorable mushy pattern!
How to Clean Unpaper Towels
In addition to washing in a regular wash cycle, we periodically soak our un-paper towels. They get nasty with as much use as they get, so I like to give the whole set a heavy-duty wash at least once a month.
I don’t have a magic recipe or anything, but water and baking soda or water and vinegar both do a decent job at “stripping the scuzz” from our unpaper towels. This gets them back to a fresh white color! Alternatively, you could use bleach or another laundry cleaner, but I find the vinegar or baking soda soak works just as well.
How to Store Un-Paper Towels
We choose to roll ours onto a towel tube and put them onto a towel stand. The goal is to make them as simple to use as single-use paper products. I suggest avoiding storing them in a drawer or other container, as they won’t be as convenient to grab one-handed.
How to Roll Your Un-Paper Towels Without Making a Huge Floppy Mess Like Ean
Step 1: Neatly Stack Them
Make sure the patterns go the same way if that sort of thing will bug you!
Step 2: Roll The First Towel
Roll your first towel onto the tube, ensuring it’s nice and tight!
Step 3: Keep Rolling!
Offest them just a bit, and keep rolling away! Always place your last seam down, along the far left side of your pile. Keep the rolls nice and tight! This is where Ean fails fantastically every time and turns the whole roll into…well….a pile.
Step 4: Slap ’em on your towel holder!
Look how snazzy those look on the counter! Not only are these a sustainable option, but they make me feel so fancy.
How to Justify the Cost
Like many sustainable options, purchasing a set of quality un-paper towels is an up-front investment. We spent around $80 for our set of 48. At average bulk prices, that means we spent per towel what it costs per roll of single-use paper products!
This being said, we are incredibly messy people! If we used paper towels for everything we use our unpaper towels for, we’d blast through several rolls per week. This would be both costly, and incredibly wasteful.
Why Not Use Dish or Tea Towels?
Really, if you have enough dish towels and are willing to use them for all your messes, that’s a mighty fine option. That’s what we did when we lived as two separate couples.
In our bigger, busier, messier household, the unpaper towels simply offer an extra level of convenience.
They’re a perfect size, and when it was time to downgrade our old dish rags to floor rags, it made sense to invest in the nice un-paper towels.
No matter what option we chose, we’d have to buy some kind of textile for these uses. It made sense for us to support a small business by buying a perfectly sized (and adorable) product that we love, rather than a pack of dish towels from a large retailer.
If regular dish towels are more your style, consider checking out what your local zero-waste shop may have in stock. If you don’t have a local shop, online retailers like Earth Hero have great options.
Any Other Questions?
If you have any other questions about making the switch to un-paper towels, be sure to reach out to us.