Every time I see Viva paper towels advertised, I go slightly mad. Furthermore, I think I am becoming annoying. I’m worried that if I mention CALPIRG or cloth napkins one more time, someone may take a swing at me. This is all a result of my growing hopelessness which is quickly followed by the none too pleasant thought, “If everybody would just get on board here, we would be living in a smog free, tree loving, non-globally warm environment where everybody drives a Prius and uses solar panels to light their houses.” This is when I begin to hate ‘them,’ realize I am ‘them’, and a cycle of unproductive negativity begins. The thing is, I think unproductive negativity is our worst environmental offender. After all, if I can’t be kind to myself and ease up on the fact that yes, I forgot to bring bags to the grocery store for the 26th time (Jenni I feel your pain), and trusting of the rest of the world to make positive changes at their own pace, I’m not only part of the problem, I’m actually creating the problem.
That being said, I want to promote a great blog by a woman who is also trying to be part of the solution by doing what she can do. She has some great ideas for simple steps to try to make the world a greener place to be (Karen, she’s got some wonderful posts about her experiences composting and other nifty ideas).
Can you talk more about cloth napkins? What kind you buy, how you use them, where to store them, how many times do you use them before washing them? They seem like a great solution, but incredibly time consuming and hard to figure out. (I feel like I did w/ cloth diapers before I started doing that…)
Before I switched exclusively to cloth, I had about 4-5 cloth napkins. When I decided to go whole hog, my first impulse was to buy a lot of 90 (yes 90) used cloth napkins I found on ebay. It turned out I was outbid, which was probably for the best because I haven’t needed nearly that many. I ended up buying 4 more napkins on ebay. What I do is use my plastic paper napkin holder for cloth napkins which gives me the feeling that I haven’t given up the convenience of having a napkin to grab whenever I need it. For the most part my husband and I go through all of our 8 or 9 napkins a week and then I wash them–no special care. My napkins are slightly different colors, so we can tell each others apart, and we just keep using it until it gets icky. It boils down to about 2 napkin changes a week. I’d say 3 napkin changes a week would be optimal and I may end up buying another set so I still only have to do laundry once a week. We when eat super messy food, I have started not wiping my hands at all during the entire meal, and then just washing them at the end. I’m not really suggesting this because it is a little on the rude and sloppy side, but if you don’t care, hey, it saves you having to wash that napkin, right? I think even if you change your napkin every day it doesn’t add that much to your laundry. Napkins are pretty small and so even 20 napkins thrown in with the rest of your towels will still fit in a load.
we also have very simple cloth napkins that get tossed into the wash and stashed in the china cupboard. Sometimes we get fancy and tie them to the back of the chairs to keep track, then toss in wash, etc.
Thanks for composting link!
In news of light bulbs, we just moved and my dad got me like 30 of the energy saving bulbs as a housewarming! He also brought beer and bagels, but the bulbs! I’m so excited!
I would like to see a continuation of the topic