Here at Sustainability Saturday we’re noticing a trend in our 2×12 Reduction Challenge choices – we like to work with a theme! First we focused on reducing plastic from our dental hygiene routine in February, and then March has been all about paper products. Earlier in March we switched to a recycled toilet paper that doesn’t have any plastic wrapping, which then inspired us to make a similar switch for tissues.

Tree Free Solutions

As you may have read in our Eco-Friendly Toilet Paper post, many of our paper products, such as toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues, come from unsustainable sources and to make matters worse, they often come wrapped in single-use plastic.

Before we started our official sustainability journey here on Sustainability Saturday, we began to drastically reduce our paper towel consumption. We started using kitchen towels to dry our hands and wipe up messes, rags for cleaning, and cotton napkins for meal time. We still have a roll of paper towels on our counter for “emergencies”, but I think that one roll has been there for about 3 months now due to very low usage.

Our habit change around paper towels and our new approach to toilet paper got me thinking about tissues. I have pretty severe allergies year round because I’m allergic to dust mites, which are basically everywhere, so I use a lot of tissues. Who Gives a Crap offers tissues made from bamboo (a sustainable resource), which could be a good step in the right direction. But I decided to go a step further and try out handkerchiefs. Yep, hankies!

Handkerchiefs

I’ll be honest, at first the thought of using a hanky grossed me out. But after reading a few articles on handkerchief usage, I realized that I should be more open minded to this eco-friendly alternative. This blog post from Wasteland Rebel was particularly useful for me – she writes about how she uses hankies and provides sizing recommendations.

My conclusion based on what I’ve read and my own recent experience switching to hankies is that they’re only unhygienic if you don’t wash them after use. As long as you take the time to fold the used part inward before popping it back into your pocket/purse, and you toss them into the washing machine after use, you’re going to be just fine! We throw them into the washer with our weekly load of towels – they’re so tiny that you hardly notice them at all.

At this point we still have a bunch of boxes of standard tissues. My plan is that we will use hankies, but we’ll still have the common paper tissues available for guests. Given that we rarely have guests, these boxes should last us for many years to come. What we don’t have enough of though are hankies!

For us to make this habit really stick we’re going to need a better stash of hankies. My first batch came from the Organic Handkerchiefs Company. I emailed the owner of this small USA-based company, Jennifer, to ask which hankies were going to be softest for my nose and she recommended the flannel hankies. I went with the size small, unbleached organic flannel hankies. They’re the size of a normal tissue and they’re super soft – happy nose!

Summary

So let’s recap why we’ve decided to make this one of our sustainable switches during our 2×12 Reduction Challenge:

• Many (not all) tissue boxes come wrapped in plastic and have plastic around the opening to the box. Hankies are plastic free!
• Tissues are made of paper, therefore a tree of some sort was involved in creating it. Hankies are made of natural fibers, such as cotton.
• Tissues are single-use. We use each one for a short period of time and then throw it “away”. Hankies can be used over and over again.
• Tissues, the soft ones, are pretty expensive. Hankies can take a bit more upfront investment (unless you find them at a thrift store or make your own), but they’ll last for decades!

We realize that this switch may be a bit more challenging for people to wrap their heads around because using a hanky may feel old fashioned, gross, or strange (or all of the above), however, we’re finding it to be a much easier sustainable switch than we had anticipated.

So let us just say, Bless you, Salud, Gesundheit, Salute, and happy hanky using!

xoxo, Nicole