How to Quit Paper Towels—and Still Have a Clean Kitchen

Tired of the heaping trash can and paper towel waste in your kitchen and the spoiled food in your fridge? We've been there, too. Welcome part two of The Low-Waste Kitchen, a series from food writer and avid home cook Sarah Karnasiewicz, who shares reality-tested strategies for cutting back on kitchen waste in the real world. Check out part oneright here.

Last year, my family began making an effort toreduce our household waste, and I started thinking about how I could adopt some more mindful kitchen habits. Many of the changes we’ve since made—like always carryingreusable shopping bagsandswapping out disposable lunch containers and bagsfor cloth, glass, and stainless steel—were easy to implement. But it wasn't long into our low-waste journey before I realized that our paper towel addiction might be a trickier nut to crack.

Without really thinking about it, over the years (and especially after becoming parents—sooooo many sticky fingers and spills!) my husband and I had become utterly dependent on that omnipresent roll on our counter. How serious was our habit? Let’s just say that every time we found our under-the-sink stash unexpectedly empty, it triggered a sprint to the 99-cent store and a minor panic attack.

I knew that in the grand scheme of wasteful household habits, this particular vice was a minor offense — after all, lots of paper towels are compostable (as long as they’re not soiled with chemical cleaners or grease) and arguably, it takes just much water to produce a roll of paper towels as it does to wash an equivalent amount ofreusable ones.

Still, there are other sorts of waste besides the environmental kind. Each roll of Bounty my family tore through was setting us back a couple of bucks, and that money was never coming back. Plus, it struck me that robotically reaching for a paper towel every time one of us needed to dry our hands or wipe a drip flew in the face of the Earth-friendly mindfulness we were supposedly trying to cultivate.

So, I decided to give quitting a go. I thought about tapering off or just cutting back to buying paper towels on a monthly rather than weekly basis, but ultimately I reasoned that, as with so many other vices, going cold turkey just might be the most successful route. And that is how, one fateful weekend, I decided to announce to my family that the roll of paper towels currently dwindling on our countertop would not (gasp!) be replaced.

It’d be a lie to say the transition has been entirely seamless: my husband’s withdrawal turned out to be even rockier than mine, and still he still lets loose some sporadic curmudgeonly grumbling. But more than 7 months later, I’m pleased to report that on the whole, cutting paper towels out of our everyday kitchen routine has been much less painful than I ever expected, thanks to these three essential tools—and one not-so-secret strategy. Ready to try kicking the habit yourself? Here’s what worked for me:

1. Cotton “Car” Towels (Lots of Them)

Once we decided to try going paper-towel free, the obvious first question was what we would use instead—i.e., what we would we reach for every time we needed to catch a spill or dry our hands or swab the counters. I knew I wanted whatever we used to be inexpensive, durable enough to stand up to repeated laundering, and made from natural fibers if possible. When I started googling it soon became clear that there are plenty of appealing options out there, from reusableSwedish dishclothsto classic, lightweightflour-sack cloths. But in the end, I found my favorite solution in the unlikeliest of places: the automotive aisle of Costco.

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Sold in packs of 52, a suburban-sized brick ofUnitex 100% Cotton Towelssets you back about $20 and provides months and months and months of hardcore household cleaning [Editor's Note: We found asimilar pack of towels on Amazon, tooon Amazon, too]. Though billed as a car-washing tool, these are really just big, absorbent, white cotton rags—not unlike a terry side towel, the utilitarian workhorse that is a staple of professional kitchens everywhere.

The fact that these puppies come in a super-sized pack is key: if you want to set yourself up to succeed with this transition, you’re going to want a lot of towels on hand at all times. After some trial and error, I settled into a two-pronged approach—I now keep one big bucket of 20+ clean towels under my kitchen sink and another container of towels hanging from the pantry door.

Not to say there hasn’t been a learning curve. If I were to do it all over again, I would have bought two batches of towels in different colors (say grey and white)—the darker variety for serious cleaning tasks and ickier spills and the lighter shade for more delicate dish drying and food prep. But thanks to my haphazard laundry sorting, many of our white car towels turned pink, so we've managed to color-code them anyway!

2. Cloth Napkins

Yes, sue me, we used to set our dinner table with paper towels. But now we do not! Instead, we have a few sets of cloth napkins that we rotate through night by night. These are practical napkins, not party napkins—no embroidery or luxe fabrics here. Simple fabrics (cotton, linen) and darker colors (I’m partial to navy) stand up to heavy washing and do a better job of disguising the juice stains and grease smudges that are sure to accrue over time, especially if, like mine, your household includes some sweet, grubby little children. You can get a big set for not much moneyonlineor at discount retailers like Home Goods and T.J.Maxx—or, even better, take a look at what’s priced to sell at your local Goodwill (thrift stores tend to be lousy with Grandma’s discarded table linens). Really want to go for it? Assign yourself (or your kiddo) a weekend project and sew your own.

3. A Kitchen Hamper

I won’t sugarcoat it: if you ditch the paper towels, you’re going to dirty a lot of rags every day. And you’re going to need a place to put them once they’re dirty. Cross contamination—inadvertently transferring harmful pathogens onto clean surfaces—is a real health hazard in the kitchen and should be taken seriously. That’s why I separate the towels we use for cleaning and countertops from the ones for drying dishware and food prep and try my best not to mix the two. I’m also careful to hang the towels to dry when they’re damp (moisture breeds bacteria) and not to use any towel for more than one day. Instead, at the end of every day—or sooner, if the towel is seriously soiled—I toss everything into a dedicated kitchen hamper: a small basket that holds the kitchen towels and aprons that need laundering. That said, while I’m lucky (at least by NYC standards) to have a washer/dryer in my house, I don’t always wash everything every day. More often, I take a couple of days for the hamper to fill and then wash the entire contents—usually along with a good glug of bleach—spin them dry, and start the whole process all over.

4. A “Secret” Roll for “Special Occasions”

Remember how I said that when I embarked on this project, I decided to go cold turkey? Well...if I’m being really honest, it was actually more like tepid turkey. In the past seven months, I did buyone rollof paper towels—and I don’t regret it one bit. Stashed at the back of my pantry, that roll is a bit whittled down now, but still not empty. I don’t reach for it often—but I’d be a fake if I said I didn’t like knowing it was around in case of truly catastrophic messes (Norovirus! Dog poop!).

Just don’t tell my husband it’s there.