Help Save The Planet, Use Paper Towels

As every day goes by there seems to be yet another doom and gloom news report about the general decline in the state of the planet and the air that we breathe. I think we all appreciate that it is about time that we all started to do a little more to save the planet but other than doing our bit with the garbage, conserving gas and electricity and running our motor vehicles more economically what else can we do?

Using a little common sense when running a bath and ensuring that you don’t over fill it with hot water and then have to cool it down with cold water is a basic waste of energy as well as heating the house when you are not at home, your furniture doesn’t mind being cold so turn the heating off when you’re not at home. You’ll save money as well as save the planets resources.

Another simple tip to remember include not putting the dish washer on to run its cycle until it is totally full, running a half full dish washer twice uses three and a half times the energy of running a full dish washer once. The same goes with the washing machine, try to only run it for a full cycle when it is full, when the washing is finished hang it outside to dry for a while rather than putting it straight in to the tumble dryer. Even if it looks like it might rain soon if you get half an hour of drying by nature and then have to transfer the washing to the tumble dryer to finish off you will save a huge amount of electricity over the course of the year. This might add a bit of inconvenience to your life but what amount of inconvenience will it cause us all when we kill the planet.

One very green scheme that is being piloted by a very forward looking European town is selling subsidized paper towels to homes to cut down on the amount of bath towels, hand and beach towels that need washing. Bath and beach towels take a massive amount of energy to clean and to dry as well as taking a substantial amount of energy to produce in the first place, not to mention the harmful chemicals used in the bleaching and dying of the fabric before manufacture. The thinking behind this scheme is that if you can use a paper towel to dry yourself or your dishes, for example, then the amount of towels that need washing in the area will be reduced, saving energy as well as water and reducing the amount of detergent in the water coarse.

All up this seems like a wonderful scheme to adopt for a town. Obviously paper towels can not be used for every drying scenario but where they can be used they can make a vast difference to the amount of energy saved. As a final hurrah for the town all of the used paper towels are collected in special bins at home and then in turn collected by the council and taken to a special paper towel re-cycling depot where the towels are dried out and then pulped to be used as animal bedding or even eco friendly fuel for open fires.And when you consider that the paper towels are made from sixty five per cent recycled material in the first place this really is a green town looking to the future.