Cloth napkins?
By Jenn (TinyChoices.com) | August 2, 2007
As witnessed in the comments over on the “Easy Peasy Tip: Fork You!” post, ya’ll are totally punk-rock about the green thing. Jesse has a great post on his blog about dining sustainably when away from home, and he advocates carrying and using cloth napkins. Stacey told us that she uses cloth napkins at home, and then the very next day had already brought one into work to avoid using disposables there too– amazing and inspiring!
So I have a question for all you cloth-napkin folks– and it might seem silly, but it’s kind of what’s holding me back from stitching up a whole stack of cloth napkins and doing away entirely with disposables– how/where do you collect the used/soiled napkins until you’re ready to wash them? I’m not really sure what to do with the batch of dirty napkins that would collect until I do my next load of laundry. I don’t want to keep them in my laundry basket, cause that’s in my bedroom, and I really would prefer not having old food in there with me. Perhaps some kind of sealed container in the kitchen would do the trick, to hold used napkins and houshold rags?
This is a tiny choice I’d like to implement, but sometimes we need to solve the little glitches to move forward… ideas, punk-rockers?
Topics: Food, Home, Waste | 41 Comments »
I just throw mine in with my laundry! Maybe you could repurpose a bucket for non-clothes/linens laundry? (ie: dish towels and napkins)
We are making the switch to cloth napkins and I would like to make my own. However, I want to make “casual” napkins, those that don’t wrinkle. I can’t seem to find the type of fabric I have been looking for… what type of fabric/material do you suggest is best?
Thanks!
We throw ours in with our laundry, too. There generally aren’t many (a napkin lasts one person a week, on average), but they’re accentuated by the many cloth rags we use in favor of paper towels. I try to do rags/tablecloths/napkins together, separately from clothes, which are separate from bedsheets/towels… though the particulars of this scheme are enabled in part by our living in a house with room for buildup of laundry/ laundry machines in the basement, so I’m probably not in a position to give tips to apartment dwellers.
Thanks ya’ll! Living in NYC, you kind of want to keep your food in the food areas, to prevent, um, little crawly beings from coming to check out the food stash in, say, your bedroom laundry basket. Yick. I do think that a covered container underneath the sink would solve this issue…
I hadn’t thought about it, but since I so rarely eat at home, the one napkin generally lasts the entire time between laundry, so I’ll just throw it in on laundry day. Also, I generally have bits of food on my clothes and fruit pits & seeds in my pocket. Hmmm, I do need to revisit this laundry thing.
One could, I suppose, leave the napkin in the bathroom sink, so that after a few handwashings, the food stuff comes off, but then there is the hanging an unclean napkin out to dry issue. Or, even just handwashing it, maybe.
I’m kind of lazy about the dirty, and I carry around slightly soiled napkins all the time. at laundry time I collect them to wash. if they’re really dirty, I’ll rinse them out and let them dry in my shower before I put them in my hamper.
for my towel rags (cut up towel bits in place of paper towels), i just put an extra trash can next to all of my recycling and throw them in there until it’s laundry day. i’ll probably do the same when i get around to making cloth napkins.
I keep a sting bag at the top of my basement stairs and stuff dirty rags, dishtowels and napkins there. They usually dry out before they can smell. If you’re worried about critters, maybe a vinyl or cloth drawsting bag you can hang somewhere?
At work I have this small blue regtangle pail with a flip up lid and handle that we use to hold dirty midrofiber mop heads. It’s from IKEA.
I am running into the same problem! I have a ton of cloth napkins, and dishcloths, but because I don’t have a place to put the dirty ones I either am lazy and take longer to change them out, or fall back to bad habits.
We’ve also started finishing up our kitchen redo, and I am thinking that maybe I can install some kind of hamper there to make this kind of change a lot easier.
Jen, I love the idea of a built-in hamper for linens. Perhaps it can have a chute directly into the laundry room?!
I keep them in the kitchen with the dirty dishtowels. But we also use the same one for around a week, so it doesn’t build up as fast as you think it would. Also, there’s hardly big food stains on them in the first place.
Is this normal? I thoought I was being all cutting edge when I decided a few months ago to switch over to cloth napkins while dining at home. I had no idea that so many others were in on the party. Not that it’s so very many, and not like this isn’t a super special sample set, but still, duuuuude…
On a side note: did you make your cloth napkins? And if so, out of what? I have two sets – the set that I got from my grandmother’s apartment after she died – they were so nice, she was saving them and they were still in the box and the set my friends bought in India and brought over as a gift when they came for dinner.
Stacey – I buy sets of cloth napkins at the local white elephant sale. I use them for everything – even for wrapping around my water bottle before throwing it in my bag to keep condensation from getting stuff wet. I have nice handsewn ones for special occasions, but for every day use – thrift store all the way.
Stacey, and if you get them from a thrift store, etc, (as Paper Dolly Girl suggests) there’s the added bonus of not creating more waste by purchasing a new product. Pre-loved beats new any day!
Our napkins don’t seem to get all that dirty… I tend to just throw them up the stairs after dinner, and next time I actually *go* upstairs, I pick them up off the floor and put ‘em in with the regular wash. Since I do laundry every day or two, they’d never sit around for long.
I was thinking recently, though, that I should probably just keep a small basket in the kitchen where we can keep the mildly-soiled ones and re-use them until they are *really* ready to be washed.
i get that cloth napkins reduces waste idea but what about the water and energy consumption of washing them in the laundry? is this better/worse than a recycled paper one that is composted after use?
Ah hah! I was wondering when this issue would come up! Here’s my personal opinion on this situation: the addition of a relatively small amount of items (cloth napkins and cloth cleaning rags) to a regular load of laundry isn’t really taking up too much room– it’s not displacing anything I’d normally put in there, and I’m not doing an entirely separate load for them. They’re just kind of filling the additional space in between the other items. Now, this might be different if you’ve got a large household or a tiny baby :), in which case the small pieces of cloth really start adding up, and most likely do reqire their own laundry load. At which point I wonder what the energy audit on this is…
Also, I tend to hang the rags on a drying rack, so they don’t require energy to dry. But even if they’re tossed into the dryer, these items tend to be made of thin material and so dry super quickly.
And remember that, even though disposable napkins are technically biodegradable, the environment in a typical garbage heap is not actually conducive to bio-degradation. So those napkins ain’t degrading any time soon. However, if you’ve got your own compost pile going in the back…this might be different. But I wonder, even then, do you want large amounts of wood pulp (paper products) in the compost pile? Not to mention the actual environmental cost of producing those disposable products in the first place, only for them to be tossed after a single use…
you can also consider the energy cost of transporting the disposables, as well as the indirect environmental costs of creating paper products (which uses an incredible amount of water, among other things, and can also introduce bleach byproducts into the environment). if you really want to get into it you can consider the cost of transporting the raw paper materials from the mill to the factory where the napkins are created.
when you compare all of these costs to make something new and disposable, using something old and reusable really appears to come out on top! you mentioned using recycled paper goods – which would eliminate some of the transportation costs, but there will still be pick-up and transport and remilling involved. overall you’re repurposing something recycled into something disposable, and it won’t be recycled again. you could instead repurpose something recycled into something that can be reused, or something that can be recycled. that might be more efficient in the long term.
just adding a note re: the compost pile.
the wood pulp in the compost pile can actually be a good thing, so long as the paper isn’t bleached or doesn’t use lead based dyes. paper, usually shredded newspaper, is often used as a “brown” in composting.
Personally, our household generates enough browns with yard waste, etc., that we don’t need to balance our food waste with additional browns, but I know folks who generate more food waste and “greens” do supplement their browns with paper products–again, usually shredded newspapers.
There’s still the cost from the outset, and you don’t control what Bounty puts into their paper, but it’s very handy to know that if you accidentally wipe up the spilled broken egg with a paper towel, you can toss the whole lot into the compost.
without being deliberately provocative, cloth napkins don’t magically appear either though – unless ethically sourced they surely incur impact as well?
Please, continue to be deliberately provocative!
Cloth napkins do not magically appear, this is true. And let’s assume that one purchases non-ethically-sourced cloth napkins, so, just your regular standard pesticide-laden, chemically-dyed cotton napkins. I don’t know the stats on this, but it would seem that the environmental cost of producing those napkins (growing the cotton: pesticides, fuel, water; transporting the cotton to factory: fuel; milling the cotton into fabric: electricity, water, dye; transportation of fabric to stores: fuel; transportation of fabric to purchasers home: fuel) is very high. The environmental cost of producing single-use paper napkins is very, very similar, so at the point of first use, the products are about even, in terms of environmental impact. BUT this is where things change… the paper napkins get tossed, and the process begins again to produce another single-use napkin. WHEREAS the cloth napkin only needs to get washed and (preferably air-) dryed to be used again, which produces a negligable amount of pollution. And if we’re talking about using vintage cloth napkins which already exist… then the environmental impact from the production of those has already happened, so we’re talking about a pretty clean choice.
That’s my take, anyway.
In my case, they did magically appear – when cleaning out grandma’s apartment and as a thank you for dinner gift. And, we probably do have sources of existing cloth napkins – parents and others who have way too many they never use, plus thrift stores, plus hand sewing. Thinking about the volume of cloth napkins that I would own over a lifetime, I can’t even imagine it would fill Kari’s insight, nevermind the truckload of paper (recycled, unbleached, etc) napkins I surely have bought in the past 13 years of buying my own napkins.
I have been using cloth dishtowels and napkins since forever. Where to put them is a problem we solved an attractive, silver colored, flip lid trashcan, downstairs, near the kitchen. Also put the dishtowels there too. The can has a removable insert, so taking it to the laundry room is easily done (about every 2 wks).
Any large container could be re-purposed for this. The only problem with the trashcan method is the occasional visitor who believes everything is what it appears to be!
I’m so convinced that everyone ought to be using a cloth napkin at every meal that I’m currently giving away a free cloth napkin to the first two dozen people to request one. Join the cultural counter-revolution against disposability by carrying it with you outside of your house to venues where only paper is provided. It’s a great feeling to finish a meal and not throw anything away.
jesse – that’s super! what a cool initiative!
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