Set of vintage napkins with matching place mats and napkin rings from Love That Vintage
So we've made the switch to recycled toilet paper in the name of saving virgin forests, but it turns out that the bathroom isn't the only room in the house with the potential for producing lots of waste. Between paper towels and napkins and those sandwich baggies, your poor trash bin can fill up pretty fast! Not only do disposables waste resources, they end up costing you more money since you've got to constantly replace them.
Luckily, there are savvy Etsians out there to help replace those one-use products and do it in style!
Paper Towels
According to A Lighter Footprint:
Americans send 3,000 tons of paper towels to landfills each day. If your household uses a roll of paper towels per week, you could save more than $100 per year by switching to dishcloths and tea towels.
Fear not! Instead of spending that $100 every year, you can invest just 12 little dollars and dry your hands on this beautiful organic cotton tea towel by Craft Chi (pictured to the right).
Do you have a bigger mess than a tea towel can handle? For cleaning table- and counter-top spills, check out these amazing crocheted kitchen scrubbies by Kiki's Crochet. Not only can you use them over and over, you can just toss them in the washer when they start to get a little funky!
Paper Napkins
The average American goes through about six paper napkins per day. That adds up to around 2200 napkins per person, per year
Rather than contribute to the billions of pounds of paper napkins headed to the landfill, check out Curley Creations' screen printed organic cotton napkins (pictured to the left)!
If you're a fan of kitsch in the kitchen, you can also find some fantastic vintage napkins on Etsy. Take a peek at these precious Sunny Morning napkins from Love That Vintage (pictured at the top of the page). They even come with matching place mats and napkin rings!
Sandwich Baggies
For packing everything from lunches to leftovers, plastic baggies are all over the place! The End Peace has you covered for small reusable snack bags! Her little snack sacks are biodegradable PEVA lined and lead, chlorine, PVC, and BPA free (pictured to the right).
If you need something larger, Gnome Clothes offers snack bags and even reusable produce bags in all sorts of prints and sizes.
For liquid leftovers like soups and sauces, check out this precious vintage glass jar from Domestikate!
Are there other kitchen disposables that I'm leaving out? What are some ways you reduce waste in your kitchen?
Follow Becky Striepe on Twitter: 
Those organic napkins are gorgeous! And those snack bags are a really neat idea, and very cute as well. Something I personally use at the store and in the kitchen are my Carebags–uniquely designed, extremely versatile, 100% re-usable produce and bulk food bags. Their main idea is that it’s a bag you can use to take your veggies home in, wash them in, and store in your vegetable crisper in, where they work with the crisper to create perfect storing conditions. I also use them to rinse rice, beans, and grains, sift flour when I’m baking, as a scrubber to scrub dishes with, to strain jams, jellies, and broths, and that’s just in the kitchen.
Anyway, thank you for all these great ideas! I will definitely check out some of them to green up my kitchen a little more.
Oh great idea! It would solve my dilemma about whether you can recycle those plastic produce bags, too! I suspect that you can’t.
Becky,
No, I know some people who reuse them as doggy bags, but they’re not recyclable, unfortunately. If you’re interested in Carebags, I ordered them off the website, carebagsonline.com.
Wow, that is a very cool, very green idea.
I think I’ll check those out.
Carebags are super duper. Our family has virtually given up all plastic. There are many more uses we’ve put these fabulous bags to. I urge everyone to try em.