Try a Cloth Kitchen Before Cloth Baby Diapers
Replace Disposable Products with Un-Paper Towels and Kitchen Cloth
Nov 26, 2008
The decision to choose cloth baby diapers can be hard to make. On the one hand, parents want to make environmentally friendly choices for their children. On the other hand, there is a big commitment and initial investment to using cloth diapers. Parents unfamiliar with cloth diapers may question whether it will be too much work.
Try to Give Up Disposable Products
One way to decide if cloth baby diapers are the right choice is to try living without disposable paper products. Choosing a disposable-free lifestyle in the kitchen is an easy choice that can instantly be reversed. There is no risk involved because parents can simply choose to purchase disposable products again if they don’t like the cloth culture.
Replace Disposable Products With Kitchen Cloth
Almost all households already have what is needed to eliminate using disposable products in the kitchen, such as paper towels, paper napkins, paper plates and tissues. The items that replace paper products are inexpensive and most are available in the dollar store. Paper plates are the easiest to replace because most households already have regular plates and dishes. In most cases, it is simply a choice not to purchase paper plates. Hand towels and dishtowels are available at the dollar store. Handkerchiefs and bandanas can replace tissues in the home and are also very inexpensive. Cloth napkins can add some life to kitchen décor and a little bit of glamour to the dinner table. They can be hand sewn or purchased at thrift shops. The idea is to spend as little as possible on the all-cloth kitchen to see how it works.
Switch to Un-Paper Towels
Parents trying out a disposable-free lifestyle may have the hardest time adjusting to getting rid of paper towels. That’s because paper towels are used in so many different ways. It is very easy, however, to replace paper towels with cloth equivalents. Paper towels used for hand drying are replaced by un-paper hand towels. Paper towels or baby wipes used as a way to clean children after meals can be replaced by un-paper baby washcloths. Paper towels used to clean the house can be replaced with microfiber towels work very well on all surfaces.
Cloth Kitchens Reduce Waste
How is a cloth kitchen similar to using cloth diapers? The main way is in the commitment. Parents who choose cloth diapers could just as easily go buy disposable diapers instead. For reasons like helping the environment, long-term financial savings and being more conscious of what they throw away, they choose not to give up on cloth diapers. Committing to a cloth kitchen is not expensive at all so it is an easy, cheap, risk-free way to see if this lifestyle change is going to stick. If using cloth in the kitchen is too much of a stretch, disposable diapers are probably a better choice.
Laundering Kitchen Cloth
Another way an all-cloth kitchen is similar to cloth diapers is in the fact that there is additional laundry. An all-cloth kitchen does mean a little bit more laundry, but it does not involve doing anything different from the normal laundry loads. All kitchen cloths can be washed on hot water with other towels and then dried in the dryer. Like cloth diapers, wet kitchen cloths left unwashed for long periods will begin to smell. Although an all-cloth kitchen doesn’t add a lot of extra laundry, it needs to be washed in a timely manner. That is another reason why a cloth kitchen is a good dry run for parents considering cloth diapers.
Parents who aren’t sure if they want to use cloth baby diapers on their babies may want to try an all-cloth kitchen before committing to cloth diapers. This inexpensive and risk-free experiment is a perfect trial run to see which part of a cloth lifestyle might be a minor inconvenience and which part might be a deal breaker.
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