Paperless Kitchen
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How to make your kitchen paperless
All of us are trying to do our part to better this environment by “going green.” We spend a good portion of our day in our homes, so this should be one of the first places we evaluate to make sure we’re doing the best to be green! Here’s a few tips to make your kitchen a paperless one. The goal of a paperless kitchen is to minimize waste/trash, which helps reduce landfills from overflowing. Paper plates, cups, plastic utensils and paper napkins make our lives convenient. But perhaps in today’s day and age, we have to rearrange our priorities – making the environment more important than convenience.
1. Remove paper towels. Use cloth towels to dry your dishes, clean up spills and wipe your counters. At my home we dry our dishes with flour sack towels (they’re light, but still absorb so much). My mom also has a bunch of kitchen hand-sized towels for wiping the counters down and for small spills. We also have regular cotton towels in a drawer for larger spills. Invest in a stack of different sized kitchen towels, and it can go a long way! Yes, you will have a bit more laundry, but it’s worth it!
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2. Ease and usability. Have you ever heard of the saying “out of sight, out of mind?” This applies to your kitchen as well. Maybe one of the reasons we always reach for a paper towel is because they’re easy to see and find. Make your cloth towels accessible to your whole family, by adding a towel bar/rack to hang them on, or creating a neatly stacked pile of clean towels (ours is right by our kitchen phone). If you want to remove the paper towel temptation, don’t add a new roll of paper towels to your holder – try it out and over time, you’ll get used to using your cloth towels.
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3. At the dining table. Get rid of your paper napkins and replace them with cloth napkins! Choose a darker color napkin if you’re afraid of staining. Cloth napkins make decorating for parties and holidays fun. They’re also a nice touch for guests! Also using actual plates, cups and utensils for eating (instead of paper and plastic) is a good way to reduce waste. If you’re going for a picnic or outdoors for a BBQ, try bring plastic, washable plates and cups – to prevent breaking your nice china. Tupperware can also be an effective way to minimize your ziplock bag waste!
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4. Categorize. Since you’re replacing paper towels with cloth towels; and cloth towels will be used for many purposes – don’t get your cleaning cloths confused with your dining clothes. A good way to remember which towel is used for what purpose is by using different colors. Categorize your towels so you don’t use one with bleach on it as a dinner napkin.
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5. Reduce and Reuse. After you’ve used your cloth towels for a while, you’ll notice they start to get old-looking. Just give them a new purpose! Use your old rags for outdoor cleaning, dusting, painting, etc. Towels have so many uses!
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Source: Simple Mom
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