How to Cut Down on Paper Towel Waste

Sometimes stashing the paper towels isn’t enough. “I have a paper-towel problem,” senior staff writer Rachel Wharton admits. “If they are there, I will use them up, like within a day. Or an hour.”

She decided to go cold turkey and stop buying them because she could hear them calling to her from behind the cabinet door.

The most straightforward alternative is to buy more reusable towels. A lot more. “Get both nicer towels and cheap bar mops since they serve different purposes,” editorial director Marguerite Preston says.

The upfront cost for a package of bar mops or microfiber cloths is about the same as for a multipack of Kirkland Signature Paper Towels. So you’ll amortize the price of your reusable products in just a few months.

Bar mops, such as the Utopia Towels Kitchen Bar Mops, are inexpensive, lower-quality cotton cloths that you can use for messes that stain (like coffee or sriracha sauce).

Budget pick

These affordable terry cloth towels aren’t cute, but they’ll get the job done, wiping up spills from big to small.

Some paper-towel teetotalers like Marguerite will use bar mops for bacteria-laden tasks, including patting meat dry (then they toss the dirty cloths straight into a hot wash). Others, like editor Katie Okamoto, who covers sustainability, will reserve a few unbleached paper towels for those kinds of tasks and then toss them in the compost.

Higher-quality kitchen towels, like Williams Sonoma All Purpose Pantry Towels, a top pick in our guide to the best kitchen towels, are nicer to look at. They can be reserved for drying dishes and hands or for wiping up water spills, so they don’t get too grimy too quickly.

Top pick

With terry cloth on one side and waffle weave on the other, this towel combines absorbency, utility, and attractiveness.

Another excellent alternative are Swedish dishcloths, like the If You Care Sponge Cloths, which make for an excellent paper-towel replacement. “A single 54-square-inch cloth can absorb as much as 36 tablespoons of water, about the volume of a standard can of tomato soup. It’s also inexpensive, at $1.15 per cloth at this writing,” according to our guide.

Top pick

Of the seven Swedish dishcloths we tested, this cloth tied as the most absorbent, and only one other option was cheaper.

You could also consider a microfiber towel like the Fixsmith Microfiber Cleaning Cloth, the top pick in our guide. “It’s the only washable cloth I’ve ever found that gets close to the amazing absorbency of a paper towel,” Rachel says. “They don’t get hard, they don’t stain, they soak up a lot of liquid, they can be wrung out easily, and they air-dry quickly.”

Top pick

Despite being made with the same materials as virtually every other cloth we tested, the Fixsmith cloths were the most absorbent and most affordable, and they survived multiple washes.

She says she is aware of the concern about microfibers in the waste stream, so to reduce harm, she gently washes and air-dries these towels.

And if your boyfriend is mopping up his messy maw with a paper towel rather than a napkin, don’t worry. We also have a guide to cloth napkins.