The Paperless Kitchen

By: Katy Rank Lev

Your kitchen is most like your family’s largest contributor of solid waste in American landfills, since everything from food scraps to food packaging to paper towels seems to make its way into our trashcans. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that paper alone made up 31% of all municipal waste in 2008. (Environmental Protection Agency) Luckily, the kitchen is one of the easiest places to cut back this kind of consumption.

Not everyone feels ready to compost food scraps–after all, worm composters for urban apartments signify a serious step toward crunchiness–but going paperless in the kitchen is much easier than it sounds. The idea of cloth rags or napkins scares many people away, but mostly because we’re so wired to reach for a paper towel the moment someone spills spaghetti sauce. We move our bodies subconsciously as we wipe, crumple, then toss our Brawny in the bin.

The trick to breaking such behaviors is to make sure your family has a healthy supply of absorbent, properly-sized kitchen cloth in an accessible place. A ten-day supply of rags and napkins means you’ll amass about one extra load of laundry per week without running out of supplies or growing funky smells in your dirty bin. How much is a ten-day supply? That depends on the age of your children, feistiness of your pets, and messiness of your cooking. Just remember: promotional t-shirts ripped into squares make excellent stand-ins when you’re running low.

Simply owning the cloth supplies won’t help your family actually use them in a kitchen crisis, however. Find a spot in the kitchen to store your bulk supplies, but make sure the everyday materials are out and ready in a pinch. Modern storage solutions (baskets, bins, you name it) can help you keep rags on the counter without affecting your décor.

If you keep a bin of, for instance, Costco brand pub towels in the exact spot your paper towel roll used to reside, most likely by the sink, you’re not even asking your family to adjust their muscle memory in the heat of a hot-sauce incident. Storing a bin for the dirty rags right near your trashcan has the same effect.

Since cloth napkins are colorful, fun, and inexpensive, it really doesn’t take long to build a collection large enough to replace your family’s paper napkin stash. You can even buy separate napkins for guests or tomato-based meals. Like paper towels, they can be stored in the same space you formerly kept your paper supply and nobody will think twice about reaching for one at dinner time.

Katy Rank Lev is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer
whose work covers parenting, sustainability, and cupcakes. She writes things down at www.katyranklev.com.