BYON

Bring Your Own Napkin

One of the best ways to increase your personal sustainability is to keep an eye on everything you throw into a garbage or recycling can. Trace your steps back from the two-pointer swoosh you just made with that crumpled piece of paper into the recycling can and ask why you needed to throw it out. The class which prompted me to create this blog has also challenged me to go a few days creating no garbage. Thanks to the unforseen norovirus epidemic ripping through my school, our dining services has made a garbage-free day next to impossible. However, I have made one significant change that has limited all of my "throwing away" to the fault of dining services.

Before proceeding, I would like to send a big shout out/thank you to Alaina Ungarini for turning me on to this sustainable move. Thanks for being obsessed with consumption reduction with me, homie.

What I Do

Cut up an old tee-shirt and use it for napkins, tissues, hand towels, everything! Throw them in the washer after you've used them, and revel in their reusable nature. I took the plunge on Tuesday by cutting up an old shirt as such:

What I wish I knew

Tee-shirt material doesn't dry that quickly, so I've now gotten in the habit of tying strip that I use to dry my hands on the back of my backpack so it dries a little faster. Currently, I'm just leaving it in the sun on a table to dry. These strips also don't clean up big spills very well. I'd recommend a hand-towel for that, or maybe just make your roll of paper towels last a bit longer by supplementing with reusable options. I also don't totally recommend using the tee-shirt strips if you have some sort of contagious illness that requires a lot of nose-blowing since you'll probably run out of your strips very quickly, and washing them in a space used by many people, as it is with college living arrangements, may turn into a health hazard. They're great for allergies, though! Other than that, just remember to wash your strips so you don't run out!

Environmental Win

Let me just hit you with some paper towel waste stats here thanks to The Paperless Project (which has some other great tips on how to make a paper towel last, if you're interested)

• To make one ton of paper towels 17 trees and 20,000 gallons of water are polluted. • In the U.S. we currently use more than 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year and that number is growing steadily. This equals more than 3,000 tons of paper towel waste in the U.S. alone. • Globally, discarded paper towels result in 254 million tons of trash every year. • As many as 51,000 trees per day are required to replace the number of paper towels that are discarded every day. • If every household in the U.S. used just one less 70-sheet roll of paper towels, that would save 544,000 trees each year. • If every household in the U.S. used three less rolls per year, it would save 120,000 tons of waste and $4.1 million in landfill dumping fees.

These stats are pretty shocking and they don't even include paper napkins that you'd get at a restaurant or face tissues which are also replaceable via the tee-shirt method. Unlike office paper, paper towels, tissues, and napkins are much harder to reuse or recycle. I have seen napkins made from biodegradable material, but in the likely event your dining hall or grocery store does not provide them, bringing your own tee-shirt strips guarantees less landfill waste.

Economic Win

Tissues - I found some interesting estimates of lifetime expenditure on facial tissues via Reddit which put that number between $633 and $840 which isn't all that much money on it's face. However, if 20 year old me invested the average of those two numbers, $736.5, knowing I was not going to buy any more facial tissues for the rest of my life, I would have about $5,600 to take myself on a nice vacation by the time I hit 50. On a less personal note, decreased paper consumption and waste means less economic burden on all of us in the long run when the price of waste management and paper production increases as resources become more scarce.

Paper towels and napkins - For the most part, college students rely on their respective schools to provide paper towels and napkins. I, personally, do not incur this cost because of this. However, I found a great breakdown of rags v. paper towels cost wise on The Simple Dollar if you are not a college student and would like to see how the costs break down if you are buying your own paper towels.

#sustainableliving #waste #napkins #papertowels #tissues #reuse