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Napkins, Filters and Bags
By Daphne | February 27, 2008
A few weeks ago I started the 30-day plastic bag diet. It really isn’t an issue but I have been more aware of the bags that I receive and the packaging that items are in. There are a lot of things that can be recycled such as toilet paper rolls, cereal boxes and other items. Plastic bags are just as reusable as cloth and paper.
Even as I sort through some of the things that need to be shredded I find some pieces of paper without any identifying information on them and I can just put those into the recycling bag instead of wasting more energy shredding additional pages. This adds up over the course of a week.
Something else I noticed is that I save a lot of paper because I have a reusable filter that I use for my coffee pot and don’t use a filter at all when I use my stove top espresso maker. I didn’t give up filters. I used them a few times and didn’t like it. I prefer to just dump the grounds instead of having to empty the paper filter which always seemed to make a bigger mess.
The biggest thing that I have given up and haven’t really noticed is the paper napkin. I do not miss paper napkins. Along with the 30-day bag diet I gave up buying paper napkins. Instead I use random cloth napkins that do not go with a table cloth, so when I want to use the table cloth, the napkins are not faded. There are many stores that sell just random cloth napkins and for the price of a package of paper napkins I can purchase truly reusable napkins.
At first I thought that this was going to be difficult, but it hasn’t been. If I eat something that is really messy, I can take a paper towel and moisten it and put it on a placemat and use that to wipe my fingertips or use one of the paper napkins. Paper napkins are still useful just as paper towels are, but it is important not to use them as much.
There are alternatives to paper products: cloths. There are times when the mess is too great (or toxic) and you just want to get rid of the waste. Then you can use a recycled paper product and use it sparingly.
When you use cloth in place of paper or something that can be reused several times before discarding it, you consider how much you consume and the amount of energy or resources that could be saved. Some foods and messes just are not conducive to cloth napkins, and when you eat those once in a blue moon, use paper but make sure you don’t use a lot and that it is recycled.
Topics: February 2008 |