Originally posted on Skoy Enterprises LinkedIn.
If it wasn’t evident before, the empty grocery store shelves at the start of the pandemic made one thing abundantly clear: Americans have an unhealthy obsession with paper towels.
From cleaning up spills to washing windows to killing bugs to napkin replacements, Americans turn to the paper towel for just about all of our home needs. As a country, we spend a whopping $5.7 billion dollars a year on paper towels—that’s almost half of the total global spend. If you weighed all of the paper towels Americans use in just one year, it would weigh 13 billion pounds.
But what is it about paper towels that has Americans so hooked?
In his article for The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker makes the argument that Americans’ addiction to paper towels is likely to do with our love of instant gratification. “Perhaps the paper towel satisfies some deeper, uniquely American desire to be immediately rid of a problem, whatever the cost,” Pinsker says.
That’s been the American way for decades it seems. But as concerns over climate change continue to escalate at an alarming rate, is this instant gratification way of living something we can continue to revel in?
Paper towels obviously make a huge impact on trees (it takes 17 trees to make 1 ton of paper towels), but they also require an incredible amount of water (20,000 gallons per ton) and they are difficult to recycle once they get contaminated (which is the entire reason for a paper towel).
What’s more shocking than anything: Even as we make moves toward living more sustainably, paper towel usage is steadily on the rise. According to the Statista Research Development, there were over 20 million more Americans who use paper towels in 2020 compared to 2011. The number of paper towel users in America is projected to increase to 331.16 million by 2024.
That is unless we turn to an alternative. An alternative that is cheaper and better for the environment. An alternative that can be washed in the dishwasher or washing machine and come out acting brand new. An alternative that has the power to replace 15 rolls of paper towels with one 7″ by 8″ sheet.
The solution to America’s paper towel addiction is an obvious one: the Swedish dishcloth.
Skoy brought the Swedish dishcloth to America in 2007 with the Skoy Cloth. Skoy Cloths are 100% biodegradable, absorb 15x their weight, and can save you hundreds of dollars that you would otherwise spend on paper towels.
Save your wallet. Save the planet. Buy a Skoy Cloth.