Green Up Your Kitchen [General]

2010 Dec 2
Oh the irony! Stephen and Chris are having a "Green Up Your Kitchen" contest - sponsored in part by Scott Towels!

My first green kitchen tip - get rid of paper towels and use cotton cloths :-)

I entered anyway

www.cbc.ca

2010 Dec 2
LOL!!

I also laugh about this because I stayed with a friend and his slightly odd girlfriend who ONLY used paper towels. No tea towels. She had this phobia of people drying their hands on the dish towels rather than hand towels so she opted for the disposible route. It drove me crazy and I went and bought tea towels the first day I was there.

2010 Dec 3
don't totally knock paper towels - for those of us on a septic, there is very little other way to grab a greasy mess and contain it before it hits the sink. As one who has had to clean out the grease from my septic pump, its a worthy cause for those trees.

You city folks can probably get by without them ...

2010 Dec 3
Cotton soaks up grease. Old t shirts do a fine job here in the city. Guess they work differently in the country :-) I've got a bag of old cotton t shirts and towels right in the kitchen. Wipe. Wash. Reuse

Or what am I missing?

2010 Dec 3
I was also thinking of trading in my paper towel for cotton wipes but realized that the amount of electricity, water and detergent required to clean them wouldn't necessarily make this more beneficial for the environment.

2010 Dec 3
Zymurgist, you'd still have to wash the grease out of those cotton rags and it would still end up in your septic since we're not allowed grey water pits.

2010 Dec 3
Aha! That is what I am missing, isn't it? Duh!

Yan - I toss them in with my regular laundry. I don't go through enough of them to make a difference.

2010 Dec 3
Ahhh. The SO would murder me if I tossed greasy rag in with the regular laundry...

2010 Dec 4
yes, can't wash the grease in the laundry - exactly the problem.

2010 Dec 4
this kind of topic always interests me, the same as the paper bag vs the plastic bag debate.
when looking at say a cotton cloth vs the paper towel, we have to follow it way back to where the raw materials come from to truely decide which is more environmentally friendly. Where is the cotton grown, how is it grown, how is it processed, how far does it travel before being made into a shirt, for example, how many washes and uses did the shirt have before it was used as a rage VS the paper towel...trees, cutting, transport, processing, recycling, reusing, dyeing, etc. etc. Growing trees is good, isn't it?
Also, i would think the paper towel breaks down organically better than the cotton rage, I'm guessing.

Discussions as these remind me of the theory of which is more environmental, the tomato grown locally in our climate (hothouse, etc.) or the tomato grown in a climate that suits its production, like down south somewhere.

I'm involved somewhat in the LEED certification in buildings, and its quite interesting and challenging to trace building materials and practises back in their production.

2010 Dec 4
In my view it is simply a matter of reducing the disposable mindset. There is far, far too much in our lives that is disposable, and collectively it is a terrible mindset to have and is overall bad for the planet even when one or two individual items may not be so bad. It is a one-way economy.

So for a "best guess, shot in the dark", I'll always choose reusable over disposable. The odds are overwhelmingly in my favour that it will be the best choice.

2010 Dec 5
I too like the idea of re-using old cloth. Most of our clothes are far to trashed to be donated or passed on to others when we're thru with them. So we cut up old shirts, towels, or whatever has become a rag.

To avoid the greasy or way-too-gross rag in the laundry, we have come to this solution: Some rags get washed and reused, some go right into the trash with their icky mess.

Natural and even synthetic fabrics do compost quite well. I often find the odd kids sock that's been dropped in our yard somewhere. Even if it's only been in the yard for a few weeks, the cloth that isn't burried in dirt has bleached out and started to breakdown. most times it's so trashed by the sun and rain that it can't even be salvaged as a rag.