How cute is this wee one, rocking the recycling? This photo is one of several already submitted to the Green Week photo pool, celebrating the best of reducing, reusing and recycling.
Today’s earth-friendly idea is using cloth instead of disposable anything. Such as cloth napkins, towels and of course, diapers. My friend Amanda emailed me a ton of stats on why it is important to use cloth. Did you know it takes 500 years for a disposable diaper to decompose? In contrast, it takes just $17 in water during a child’s life to clean cloth diapers. No landfill waste, less diaper rash, and oh — you aren’t contributing to the 1 billion trees cut each year just for diapers. Yikes!
This week I’m sewing cloth napkins to use at home. I’m also whipping up some knit dishcloths. A few other simple paper-saving things I try to do include using junk mail envelopes for note paper, sharing magazines and books with friends, printing with the “selection only” feature to prevent pages of unwanted text when printing off the web, and reusing shipping boxes for mailing.
What can you do to use fewer paper products?
~K