Day 8 of 20: Paper cut

It took a week to break the habit of automatically reaching for a paper towel or napkin in my workplace and in public places. At home, I've used cloth napkins for most of my adult life, and I've probably purchased paper towels once in the last three years. At work though, there's no private towel rack in my office. (That's an idea.)  

Let's assume the average person uses the restroom three times a day during work hours. Before this challenge, I'd guess that I used three towels a day in the restroom, plus one or two in the break room after washing utensils, dishes and containers after lunch. Five a day, five days a week, and 48 weeks a year (less vacations, holidays and other outages) means 1,200 paper towels.  That's not a lot, right? That's fewer than five of these:

From http://i.walmartimages.com/i/p/00/74/95/07/06/0074950706202_500X500.jpg

The problem with this math is that we don't just take one napkin or towel in each instance. The people near me at lunch today each had two. In a restaurant a few evenings ago, I was given a stack of napkins in addition to the one wrapped around my silverware. Considering the paper towels and napkins I found stuffed in my backpack and in my desk at the top of this challenge, I'd guess I use way more than 1,200 towels a year.

Courtesy of Kevin, one of my teammates, here's a TED Talk aptly called: How to Use a Paper Towel. Its author states that Americans use 13 billion paper towels every year. That's 52,000,000 of those packages pictured above.

If each of us used only one paper towel a day -- and I can now vouch for the fact that it's not hard to reuse the same paper towel throughout the day -- we could reduce our usage by 571,230,000 lbs of paper towels each year. 

That would save 5 million trees.  

Five million is roughly the number of trees in New York City.  Imagine cutting all of those down just so that we could use as many towels as we wanted, for one year.

Today, I simply shook my hands off and waved them in the air. It's summer, and in our air conditioned buildings, my hands dry fairly quickly. If I'm in a hurry, wiping them on my pants works fine. (My wet hands are clean after all, so it's not like I'm wrecking my clothing.)

In winter though, I'm going to want to use a towel. Now I know how.

 
P.S. Learn Why Using Toilet Seat Liners is Basically Pointless. Thanks to Madison for sending this article.