Monday, May 25, 2009

Replacing paper towels with... diapers?

In our household, we've been getting a little too paper towel happy - burning through 12-packs of even the most absorbent paper towels at lightning speed (it's easy to do when you have a toddler who tracks dirt/apple juice/milk through the house). Not only was this habit expensive, it was also extremely wasteful. 

So we've decided to change our environmentally unfriendly ways and replace the disposable stuff with 3-ply prefold diapers, the kind you can find in multi-packs in the baby product aisles at most department stores. When our son was born, we received what seemed like a truckload of these things as gifts. We used some of them as diapers, some of them as burp clothes, and some of them to clean the house. For that last purpose, they work especially well.

Some benefits of using prefolds as cleaning implements:

-They're extremely absorbent, much more so than most paper towels or regular kitchen towels.

-They're great for wiping streaks off mirrors, spills off countertops, and fingerprints off the dishwasher/refrigerator/oven door. I also use them to clean the sink area in the bathroom; they do a nice job of polishing up the faucets.

-You can just toss them in the wash whenever you do a load of laundry. 

-You can use them over and over again. Their effectiveness actually increases the longer you have them (they work best after they've been washed a few times).

Because we'd been purchasing some of the pricier paper towel brands, switching to this cloth cleaning option should save us a significant amount of money in the long run (and maybe save a few trees, too).

No comments:

Post a Comment