Phase 1 of Ditching Disposables - Non-Bathroom Paper Products

-
Long before we had paper products for everything, we had cloth. Returning to our historical resources has saved me a lot of money over the last year, and I’ve learned a few things about managing these items.
Prepare for a series of posts addressing the following: 

Bathroom paper products will be covered elsewhere, since they are a whole other deal. 
Some things I have figured out: 
It will take some time to build a collection of cloth products big enough to replace your paper ones. Go ahead and buy a couple things here and there. Start using cloth for some things and keep a few paper items around for when they are truly necessary. By the time you completely run out, you may not feel like you need to replace them. And you don’t have to do all these things at once. Pick one or two and start replacing things. Once you see that it’s not a lot of work, I think you’ll be motivated to keep going. I have been!
Once you replace a lot of things with cloth, you will definitely have more things to fold. I hate folding laundry and now I have so many little squares of fabric to fold all the time. But I have found that I don’t do laundry more often; I just throw in a few things every time I wash. 
So many fabrics.

This can save you SO MUCH MONEY. Once you stop buying paper products and have a collection of cloth items that you reuse you don’t need to buy those things ever again. And buying them up front doesn’t have to be expensive. Most of my fabric items came from monthly discount services like MightyNest so I got them for a discount or they came from thrift and second-hand stores. The towels you use as kitchen rags don’t need to be pretty because you are buying them to clean up your grossest messes. My French press came from a Goodwill.
If you want a referral code for MightyFix, MightyNest's monthly service, let me know and I'll hook you up with a free month.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sustainability Ain't Fancy

-
This week I've been trying to think of all the things I want to say about the sustainability efforts I've made, and what I've learned and the more I've typed the more I've wanted to type about. But there has also been a lot of anxiety involved in putting this on the internet and here's why:  If you look at the internet these days, at influencers, and some of the loudest voices advocating a sustainable lifestyle, they are usually wealthy and they are almost always curated as hell. The photos are edited and polished. The lighting is just so. There is a quaint story to go along with each decision and everyone seems to have the design savvy of someone with a 4 year interior decorating degree. (Is that a thing? I don't know if that's a thing.) And I'm not hatin'. I respect all the work these folks are putting into their online presence and I'm generally envious of anyone with a design sense. The first time I lived alone, my beau at the time cam...
Read more

Paper Towels ⭢ Rags, Y'all (and e-cloths)

-
Image
I have embraced the Southern tradition of the kitchen rag. This is not to be confused with the kitchen towel with which we are all familiar. I have a stack of cloths from all kinds of sources, all of which are roughly the size of a dishcloth. They have come from the following places:  A cut up sweatshirt Swedish dishcloths - we'll talk about these later 2 different kinds of cloths from Mighty Nest Some dishcloths that I knitted when I was learning how to knit that have always been too heavy to be actual dishcloths Kitchen towels that have been sufficiently destroyed by use that they can no longer in good conscience be hung from my oven handle. The beauty of building your collection of kitchen rags is that they can come from anywhere! In fact, I have found that having a variety of materials comes in handy for various cleaning tasks. The clean bin of them sits in my kitchen and when I need one, I grab it, use it with my favorite surface cleaner, and toss it in the laun...
Read more