Post from the past: Buying recycled paper towels

My family and I are not big paper towel users. About the only thing we use paper towels for is to soak up the grease from the tortillas when we make tacos. (That is seriously all we use them for)
So it was not at all difficult for us to switch from regular paper towels to recycled ones.
When we came to the end of the roll of our regular ones I purchased the jumbo roll of 2 ply brown, unbleached 100% recycled paper towels from Seventh Generation. They work just as well soaking up the tortilla grease as the other ones did except these ones save trees.

I am a girl who loves facts and lists so needless to say I spent a long time reading my paper towel wrapper (which BTW is recyclable) and here are a few of the things I learned:

• Seventh Generation paper towels are made from 100% recycled material; 90% post-consumer + 10% pre-consumer materials = 100%.
  
• The brown coloring is the natural color of recycled products. White paper towels are somehow treated (usually bleached or dyed) to be white (even Seventh Generation whitens theirs although they say they are whitened without chemicals containing chlorine which leads me to believe that they still use chemicals of some kind. I will have to look into this more)
  

Jumbo rolls reduce waste by:

• Utilizing less packaging per sheet
• Using fewer cores than regular rolls
• Enabling more product to be shipped on each truck = reduction in fuel consumption.

Also, untreated paper towels can be added to compost piles.

Seventh Generation periodically offers coupons for paper towels on their website (which is something I would suggest watching for since a roll of recycled paper towels is quite a bit more expensive than a regular roll).

When you are tempted to purchase the “cheaper” paper towels remember this: