Paper Towels vs. Cloth: The Real Numbers After One Year

We cook at home every day. Real cooking — sofrito on the stove, meat marinating, kids helping and making a mess, flour on the counter, something always spilling. Our kitchen is a working kitchen and we were going through paper towels at an embarrassing rate.

I never thought about it until I started tracking our grocery spending more carefully. Paper towels were just… a line item. Every couple of weeks, another pack. It added up to close to $150 a year, maybe more. For something we used once and threw away.

Changing this was one of the simplest swaps we’ve made — and genuinely one of the ones that’s stuck the longest without any effort to maintain it.

What we switched to

We didn’t do a dramatic “throw out all the paper towels” moment. When we ran out of a roll, we replaced it with a cloth option. Gradually our paper towel use went from constant to occasional to almost zero.

For wiping counters: Swedish dishcloths. I hadn’t heard of them before we made this switch and now I recommend them to everyone who asks. They’re made from cellulose and cotton, feel a little like a sponge but more like a cloth, and absorb an extraordinary amount for their size — you rinse them, they dry fast, they don’t smell, and they go in the dishwasher. One replaces about 17 rolls of paper towels. I have four of them and rotate them through the week.

For drying hands: A small cloth towel hung by the sink. This is what my grandmother had — and her kitchen ran on a wood stove, had no paper towels, and fed a whole family every single day without issue. We have a couple of nice-looking ones that actually make the kitchen look better.

For bigger spills: Flour sack towels. These are thin, incredibly absorbent cotton cloths. A stack of six costs about $12 and lasts forever. When something really spills — and in our house, things really spill — these are what we reach for.

For draining fried food: We used to put fried food on paper towels to absorb the oil. Now we use a wire rack over a baking tray. Honestly works better.

The one thing I kept paper towels for

I want to be honest here. We still have a roll of paper towels in a cabinet. It comes out for things I genuinely don’t want to put a cloth through — cleaning out something truly disgusting, dealing with a sick kid in the middle of the night, that kind of thing. The roll lasts us about three months now instead of two weeks.

I think that’s fine. You don’t need to be perfect. The goal is less, not zero.

The hygiene question

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about raw chicken.

Here’s how we handle it: we don’t use our regular cloths for raw meat at all. For that, we use paper towels from the small roll we keep around, or we just wash the surface directly with hot water and soap. The Swedish dishcloths and flour sack towels are for clean-up, not for raw protein.

We also colour-code loosely — certain cloths live near the sink for hand-drying, certain ones are kitchen cloths for counters and spills. It’s not complicated once it becomes habit.

Everything goes in the wash at 40°C with the regular laundry. If something has been used for a big mess, it goes in at 60°C.

The numbers after a year

We probably saved $120–130 in the first year just on paper towels. The cloths we bought to replace them cost about $40 total — dishcloths, flour sack towels, a couple of hand towels. So we came out ahead in year one. Every year after that is pure saving.

But honestly the money isn’t even why I prefer it now. It’s that the kitchen just functions better. The cloths work better than paper towels for most tasks. The Swedish dishcloths in particular are remarkable — I don’t know why these aren’t more well-known.

If you cook as much as we do, this is one of the easiest switches you can make. Pick one