Paper Towels vs Real Towels

[WSUCoug1994]

Which is more mustachian?

[Chris22]

Both?  Real towels are better for most things, like drying dishes, but paper towels are important for things like using to prevent cross contamination when dealing with raw meat.  Paper towels are also better for drying your hands off the first wash after, say, repacking your axle bearings with grease, or your wife gets really, really angry.

[coffeelover]

Which is more mustachian?

I like paper towels and use them all the time for spill accidents, like pee on the floor in the bathroom from my 2 year old.
Or I use them to soak up bacon grease, I just used them to soak up any moisture from cups and as napkins. I don't buy napkins and so use paper towels for all that stuff.

I use hand towels too. We go thru 2 large loads of towels a week which includes lots of hand towels that get gross from various cooking, or kid cleanups.

[ketchup]

Real towels for drying hands and other relatively clean things.

Paper towels for dirty things that would ruin real towels like cleaning up blood, vomit, urine, and pomegranate juice.

[MMM365]

Costco 100 pack cloth towels for everything except

grease
milk spills
and nasty things that aren't worth the time

[WSUCoug1994]

thank you for the comments.

I struggle with the "real cost" of real towels.  When I calculate the cost of the towel combined with the cost of the cleaning (soap, water, electricity, time) versus the cost of paper towels as well as the environmental impact of both.

As a DIYer I can burn through some serious paper towels - grease, paint, etc. but I always wonder which is the frugal option outside of the extreme examples.

[asauer]

We use IKEA dish towels (4 for $2) for diashes, table napkins, water spills etc.  we use paper towels for pet messes and stainable kitchen spills.  We go through about 1 roll of paper towels per month and the dish towels last about 2 years until they get downgraded to garage rags.

[WildJager]

We use both.  I actually have a stash of real towels I use for automotive grease and the like.  They get dingy, but not really dangerously dirty, so they stick around after an occasional wash.

Hand towels for the kitchen are generally kept separate and treated like clothes.  Once they get too worn, they go to the work towel department.

Paper towels... while we experimented doing without we found that they're frankly fucking awesome.  Sometimes towels just aren't up to snuff.  Like cleaning glass without leaving lint.  Cleaning really gross things (as previously mentioned) so you can just throw away and forget.  Smoothing grease into a cast iron pan (and then using that towel as an awesome fire starter for future BBQs or firepits... try it!).  And, frankly, I keep them around because nothing else I've found has that little je ne sais quoi to pull a membrane off the back of a rack of baby back ribs... Just saying, that's important to me.

[leighb]

In all my life, I've never bought paper towels. Old clothes become rags. Also never bought garbage bags. Cat food and dog food bags are far superior. Buying things to throw away just feels weird.

[WildJager]

In all my life, I've never bought paper towels. Old clothes become rags. Also never bought garbage bags. Cat food and dog food bags are far superior. Buying things to throw away just feels weird.

I've never thought to use my dog's old food bags as garbage bags.  Makes sense that they are water proof... don't want the food to rot of course.  Great idea!

[mxt0133]

Real towels for everything, a few microfiber towels for very specific tasks.  Old shirts and old towels to clean the floor, blood, pee, ect and just wash.  I haven't bought paper towels years.

[Cressida]

I agree that paper towels are best avoided but are occasionally the best choice. For example, really gross spills, as some have mentioned. Also, I just can't get behind using anything other than paper towels for cleaning mirrors. Anything else just leaves lint, even supposedly "lint-free" towels.

I used paper towels forever in my daily wipe-down of the kitchen. Recently I installed a bag of rags in the main-floor bathroom and have been using those instead. It's slightly more work, but just so much less wasteful.

[tyleriam]

We stopped buying paper towels a few years ago and I have come to believe that not using them is not only cheaper but better in every way.

We cut up old clothes and towels, we have dishcloths and dishtowels and recently were gifted a bundle of nice shop rags.  We keep a small bathroom size trash can in the laundry room, that is the 'rag can'.  So if we clean up something nasty or wipe up a messy spill we just toss the rag in the rag can to be washed later.  Once it gets full my wife will run it in a load with the dirtiest clothes or towels.  If we pick up something really gross (dog puke or something) we will rinse it before tossing it n the can.  We also sort of have different rags for different messes.  If I do greasy work in the garage I might use a dirty old cut up tshirt versus a nicer shop towel.  We also use cloth napkins.

It sounds complicated but its a pretty simple system.  Our family gives us shit all the time about it but now when I use paper towels their houses they just feel wussy compared to a good rag.  An old towel cut into rectangles soaks up a lot more, gets the grease off hands better, does not flake and fall apart when scrubbing its just better in every way.  Instead of tossing paper towels in the trash can we just toss the rag in the rag can.

Sometimes if we are having family or friends over for a holiday or something we will buy one roll of paper towels to have on hand but that is it.

Giving up paper towels to us was kind of like cutting the cord and not having cable.  We feel like it's just better in every way and we wonder why we didn't do it sooner.

[Sibley]

Paper towels:
Cleaning up after cats (hairballs, accidents, throw-up)
Cleaning glass
Really gross stuff in kitchen, etc, but that's rare

Dish cloths for the rest.

Of course, my roommate uses paper towels for almost everything. I let her buy paper towels.

[seattlecyclone]

I think it's important to distinguish between messes that would ruin a cloth towel and messes that would permanently stain a cloth towel. Getting wet paint all over a towel might actually make it less useful in the future; blood or grease or most other things would just make it look ugly even after a few trips through the wash. We keep a number of old towels around that we specifically don't care about whether they get stained or not. Having these brings the "need" to use paper towels down to about zero.

[Dicey]

DH's work buys used hotel washcloths in bulk for super cheap, which they use for cleanups. They have no laundry facilities , so they're expected to throw them away. DH brings home the ones that are primarily dirty, not greasy or paint-stained. I soak and wash them in hot water. The whitest ones stay in the house, the rest go into the workshop. We use these for every type of clean-up, even gross stuff. I like that we're recycling the recycled wash cloths.

I also buy a Costco pack of the select-a-size paper towels about every other year or so. I don't use them often, but occasionally, nothing else will do. I find "half" a paper towel is often enough. I keep them on a high shelf so I don't grab for them mindlessly.

[coppertop]

My husband uses way too many paper towels, which is strange because in most ways, he is extremely frugal.  He blows his nose on paper towels, which drives me crazy because we always have facial tissue in the house.  He also uses them to dry his hands in the kitchen after washing, when there is a perfectly serviceable and clean dish towel hanging in the kitchen at all times. 

[big_slacker]

We got rid of paper towels completely over a year ago. We have two kids and a dog so messes happen. We use the cloth towels if at all possible and if it's a biohazard a rag we were gonna throw out anyway or toilet paper in a pinch.

We're a mostly plant based house, and any meat that does come in is already cooked (kielbasa for the wifey, etc.) so no raw dead animal or things like that to worry about.

[Tetsuya Hondo]

For cleaning glass, we use newspaper. Indy papers are typically free at the supermarket and other stores.

[NonprofitER]

We use IKEA dish towels (4 for $2) for diashes, table napkins, water spills etc.  we use paper towels for pet messes and stainable kitchen spills.  We go through about 1 roll of paper towels per month and the dish towels last about 2 years until they get downgraded to garage rags.

We use IKEA dish towels also. Actually we have dish towels for 99% of kitchen uses, REALLY OLD stained dish towels then move to the cleaning/garage use rotation. And we have DIY cotton napkins for (simply cut broadcloth in cute patterns) for eating with and company. We keep a small basket in the kitchen to collect "dirty" napkins and towels until washing day - next to trash, recycle bin and compost bin.

To minimize cost of washing we only do full loads (IE, toss small basket of napkins/ dish towels into whatever semi-full laundry load is going into washer) and we make our laundry soap using an online DIY recipe (cost ~$40 for 8-9 months supply).

[rantk81]

I buy the Target "up and up" brand make-a-size mega rolls in the largest package (most economical.)  They work great for everything.  Nothing works better for spraying and then wiping down kitchen counters, kitchen appliances, bathroom sink, mirrors, shower stall, and toilet.  I probably go through a mega-roll every 2 weeks.  Worth every penny.

[JoshuaSpodek]

Though I don't drink coffee and rarely eat out, I find myself in cafes and restaurants a lot meeting people and such.

Those places throw out amazing amounts of completely unused napkins. People get double or triple what they need from dispensers and leave them unused. The servers give too many, I guess feeling like extra napkins makes customers feel luxurious. They all get thrown away.

What a waste.

I started taking these clean napkins home to use. At first I was secret about it. As I got more annoyed at the mindless waste, I grew to do it more openly, which led to me realizing people agreed with me.

As a result, my home is usually oversupplied with napkins that would have been landfill.

Also, I have a couple sponges that last years.

[HipGnosis]

Sorry to complicate it, but there is a third option.
Bamboo reusable 'paper' towels.

I got them  - Bambooee is the brand I have, after learning that dish towels are often highly contaminated.

I got a roll with 'scrub dots' on one side.  I'm using one on my damp mop and one for the kitchen.
They are very soft yet very durable.  I've just been using the two for a year.  I gave away half of the roll. The scrub dots really help on the floor and for dried 'stuff' on counter or dishes. 
They rinse clean quite easy.

I still use paper towels for messes that just need to be thrown away.  And now I only use 'real' dish towels for things that are only wet with clean water.

[Sailor Sam]

I'm another that uses both. I use dish towels in the kitchen, and wipe the counters down with a sponge. I clean the bathroom with rags cut up from my old teeshirts. But I did buy a Costco sized package of paper towels back in May, and I've used 2 rolls in 9 months. My use is so moderate that I don't think the earth is gasping and dying on my account.

[zephyr911]

I went entirely without paper towels for a while, mostly because I was so put off by friends/housemates' callous waste of massive amounts of them.

AS noted, there are a few good uses for them. For most applications, a sponge, brush, mop, or real towel is more MMM in pretty much every way - financially, environmentally, Badassery, etc.

[J Boogie]

Paper towels are a good addition to your compost, so if you aren't absorbing anything toxic or otherwise unfriendly to your compost, go for it.  It's bad to throw them away as they (along with many organic compostable substances) release methane if they end up in a landfill.

I wanted to know a few rough estimates about much wood & water is required to make paper towels and this is what I found.

One tree can generally produce about 250-300 rolls of paper towels, and it requires about 4-5 gallons of water to produce a roll.

https://www.peopletowels.com/aboutpt/WageWarOnWaste

That's much worse than I thought.  I can see why there's a big push to rely more heavily on cloth towels.

[zephyr911]

Paper towels are a good addition to your compost, so if you aren't absorbing anything toxic or otherwise unfriendly to your compost, go for it.  It's bad to throw them away as they (along with many organic compostable substances) release methane if they end up in a landfill.

Whoa! I didn't know any of that. Composting PT from now on.

I can see why there's a big push to rely more heavily on cloth towels.

Yep... me too.

[big_owl]

Sometimes I feel like this is a generational thing.  Both our parents are baby boomers and they generally come to visit the owls once a year (which is more than enough).  We try to avoid using paper towels as much as possible by ourselves, probably going through a roll every couple months.  We use cloth handkerchiefs and wash them every week or so.  But when the boomers come to visit....

...HEAVEN FORBID IF THERE AREN'T ENOUGH PAPER TOWELS ON TAP.  By the end of their two-day stay they've gone through an entire roll and my trash is completely full of paper.  They start to go mad if we don't replace the empty roll right away for them.  It's like they don't know what to do.  So we just assume it's some generational thing where boomers were the first group to have access to these easy throw-away towels and they can't fathom using a reusable towel.  When they went down to view the million dollar basement one of the first observations was that we didn't have a paper towel roll on the counter top.  F*&k-off boomers, we're not putting one down there.  Deal with it.

Between recycling, composting and not using paper towels, we maybe fill up 3/4 of a trash bag a week.  And even that's often just because we have packaging from meat or chicken that gets put in the freezer during the week and gets thrown out when we go to the dump on Friday afternoons. 

[mskyle]

I didn't use paper towels for years, but I do use them some now. I use paper towels for greasy stuff, gross stuff, or stuff where I'm concerned about contamination. So I wipe out the bacon pan with a paper towel before I wash it, and since my bf is celiac but I still like to eat gluten sometimes, I use paper towels to clean up breadcrumbs and stuff.

We keep a few ratty old bath towels around for big spills - when you spill a whole glass of something, a bath towel cleans it up a lot faster than a roll of paper towels.

[Chris22]

We keep a few ratty old bath towels around for big spills - when you spill a whole glass of something, a bath towel cleans it up a lot faster than a roll of paper towels.

Depends on what that something is.  If it's other than water, like milk, I don't want some nasty milk-soaked rag laying around until I do laundry again.  If it's the weekend and I'm going to do a load anyways, no big deal for cloth, otherwise, paper towels for that mess. 

[seattlecyclone]

We keep a few ratty old bath towels around for big spills - when you spill a whole glass of something, a bath towel cleans it up a lot faster than a roll of paper towels.

Depends on what that something is.  If it's other than water, like milk, I don't want some nasty milk-soaked rag laying around until I do laundry again.  If it's the weekend and I'm going to do a load anyways, no big deal for cloth, otherwise, paper towels for that mess. 

In that situation I would probably give the old towel a quick rinse in the bathtub so it doesn't smell, and put it in the next load of laundry.

[merula]

Here's what we use:

Terrycloth washcloths: washing children, dishes, counters and floors (not all with the same one, though!)
Terrycloth hand towels: drying hands/children, drying really wet things that don't get linty
Flour sack towels: drying dishes that do get linty, covering rising dough
Cloth napkins: used at every meal, also sometimes stolen by children to clean up their own messes
Microfiber cloths: cleaning electronics and eyeglasses
Cloth diapers: cleaning up floor accidents (then thrown in the diaper pail with all the rest)
Cut up pieces of worn-out tshirts: used primarily for cloth wipes, also for cleaning random things and wiping noses. If the thing to be cleaned would ruin the rag (like paint), we compost it if possible or throw it away if not.
Paper towels: soak up kitchen grease, really gross clean-up stuff. Again, composted if possible, thrown away if not. (We go through about one two-pack of up&up make-a-size towels per year.)

I don't think you can accurately assign a cost of washing reusable towels/cloths. I wash something from one of the above categories in virtually every load, but they just go along with laundry you would do anyway. Like, if you load up your washer with all your clothes, and it's mostly-full, you could still throw in a few napkins and a dish towel and run the washer with no extra cost.

[ABC123]

No paper towels at our house.  I do keep any extra paper napkins that we might get from the occasional fast food trip.  Those get used for things like bacon grease.  For really icky things that I don't want to wash, I keep some cut up rags made from old kid clothes that were too stained/torn to be donated or passed along to my nephew.  We use cloth napkins at the table, dish rags or dish towels for cleaning up spills on the floor.  I figure the washing machine does a really good job at cleaning them, so I just toss them all in with whatever I happen to be washing at any given time.  I got the cloth napkins and a bunch of dish rags and towels as birthday and Christmas gifts over the years, and we don't do any extra loads of laundry, so there is absolutely no extra cost to using cloth over paper.  Just pure savings financially and environmentally.

[WSUCoug1994]

I don't think you can accurately assign a cost of washing reusable towels/cloths. I wash something from one of the above categories in virtually every load, but they just go along with laundry you would do anyway. Like, if you load up your washer with all your clothes, and it's mostly-full, you could still throw in a few napkins and a dish towel and run the washer with no extra cost.

I understand what you are saying - but when I have heavy soiled towels - I am not interested in mixing those with my clothes.  So I tend to save the heavy soiled towels for a separate load which is where I am curious about the cost.  Often times there is a ring left behind on the greasy ones which causes me concern as well.  For the lightly soiled I totally agree.

[MillenialMustache]

I go though 1-2 rolls of paper towels a year. No paper napkins in the house. Most of that paper towel usage is even when people come over it seems like. We have so many cloth rags we use. For grease and paint and such, my DH mostly uses the newspaper that gets thrown in our driveway (its free, I called the newspaper company to cancel it and they wouldn't...sigh). Otherwise, I give him like five house rags at a time that have gotten worn, and then he just uses them until he throws them away. We rarely wash rags once they have gone out to the garage. I am lucky (I suppose) that I have basically unlimited access to rags, as several family members give us all their old stuff and we divide it as appropriate (best stuff: Ebay, medium stuff: ThredUp, medium stuff/lower stuff: donation, damaged/worn out stuff: rags.

[Chris22]

I go though 1-2 rolls of paper towels a year. No paper napkins in the house. Most of that paper towel usage is even when people come over it seems like. We have so many cloth rags we use. For grease and paint and such, my DH mostly uses the newspaper that gets thrown in our driveway (its free, I called the newspaper company to cancel it and they wouldn't...sigh). Otherwise, I give him like five house rags at a time that have gotten worn, and then he just uses them until he throws them away. We rarely wash rags once they have gone out to the garage. I am lucky (I suppose) that I have basically unlimited access to rags, as several family members give us all their old stuff and we divide it as appropriate (best stuff: Ebay, medium stuff: ThredUp, medium stuff/lower stuff: donation, damaged/worn out stuff: rags.

You eBay old rags?  there's a market for this?

[seattlecyclone]

Sounds like they take old clothes from people and dispose of them in different ways depending on their quality. Most of them are still usable as clothes so they still get sold or donated as such.

[NonprofitER]

Sometimes I feel like this is a generational thing.  Both our parents are baby boomers and they generally come to visit the owls once a year (which is more than enough).  We try to avoid using paper towels as much as possible by ourselves, probably going through a roll every couple months.  We use cloth handkerchiefs and wash them every week or so.  But when the boomers come to visit....

...HEAVEN FORBID IF THERE AREN'T ENOUGH PAPER TOWELS ON TAP.  By the end of their two-day stay they've gone through an entire roll and my trash is completely full of paper.  They start to go mad if we don't replace the empty roll right away for them.  It's like they don't know what to do.  So we just assume it's some generational thing where boomers were the first group to have access to these easy throw-away towels and they can't fathom using a reusable towel.  When they went down to view the million dollar basement one of the first observations was that we didn't have a paper towel roll on the counter top.  F*&k-off boomers, we're not putting one down there.  Deal with it.

Between recycling, composting and not using paper towels, we maybe fill up 3/4 of a trash bag a week.  And even that's often just because we have packaging from meat or chicken that gets put in the freezer during the week and gets thrown out when we go to the dump on Friday afternoons.

I agree with this one million percent.  We hosted the entire family for a week during the holidays, including everyone's (boomer) parents. You'd think we were operating a kitchen without a modern stove given the grief we received for not having paper towels available AT ALL TIMES. As in, they dry their clean hands with them then immediately throw the lightly moistened paper towel away!  Good grief.

Sorry to complicate it, but there is a third option.
Bamboo reusable 'paper' towels.

I got them  - Bambooee is the brand I have, after learning that dish towels are often highly contaminated.

I got a roll with 'scrub dots' on one side.  I'm using one on my damp mop and one for the kitchen.
They are very soft yet very durable.  I've just been using the two for a year.  I gave away half of the roll. The scrub dots really help on the floor and for dried 'stuff' on counter or dishes. 
They rinse clean quite easy.

I still use paper towels for messes that just need to be thrown away.  And now I only use 'real' dish towels for things that are only wet with clean water.

I'm confused about how a re-washable bamboo paper towel is all that different than having a cloth towel in terms of preventing contamination?  We literally change out our kitchen towel daily - sometimes more often if we're cooking multiple things and concerned about cross-contamination. Just curious.

[shelivesthedream]

We're half-and-half at the moment, primarily because we don't have our own washing machine (basement laundromat in the block of flats) so keeping them around until weekly washday AND creating more laundry is a PITA. So it's cloths for anything cleanish (wiping up water, dusting, drying things...) and paper for anything "dirty" (cleaning up oil or mud). But I keep the paper towels in the cupboard and keep a current cloth one out to try to discourage excessive usage. When we move I'm definitely trying to convert to 99% cloth with just an emergency roll of paper.

[Rural]

 I keep a roll of paper around for the occasional cat poop accident, which then goes straight into the compost, paper towel and all. For a while, I was cleaning up cat barf with paper towels, but I realized that a very minimal amount of toilet paper will do the same job with less waste. That goes in the compost, too.   Given that our dogs are Great Danes, if they have accidents (very rare), a shovel rather than a paper towel is the best solution. :-)


On the rare occasions when I cook something that produces a great deal of semisolid grease that I don't want going into the septic tank, I'll sometimes wipe/scoop the excess with a single paper towel before washing.  Usually, though, I can pour it off into a jar of can for disposal instead.  If it's bacon grease, of course, it gets saved and reused. That shit's like gold.


 I buy a roll of paper towels about twice a year. It's more than I should use, but little enough that I have a hard time getting terribly worked up about it.

[HipGnosis]

Sorry to complicate it, but there is a third option.
Bamboo reusable 'paper' towels.

I got them  - Bambooee is the brand I have, after learning that dish towels are often highly contaminated.

I got a roll with 'scrub dots' on one side.  I'm using one on my damp mop and one for the kitchen.
They are very soft yet very durable.  I've just been using the two for a year.  I gave away half of the roll. The scrub dots really help on the floor and for dried 'stuff' on counter or dishes. 
They rinse clean quite easy.

I still use paper towels for messes that just need to be thrown away.  And now I only use 'real' dish towels for things that are only wet with clean water.

I'm confused about how a re-washable bamboo paper towel is all that different than having a cloth towel in terms of preventing contamination?  We literally change out our kitchen towel daily - sometimes more often if we're cooking multiple things and concerned about cross-contamination. Just curious.

Sorry I didn't include that.  Because the bamboo 'paper' towel is just a bit thicker than an actual paper towel, it's almost dry after being quickly wrung out.  I rinse or wash it after each use and it's ready to be re-used.

[mskyle]

We keep a few ratty old bath towels around for big spills - when you spill a whole glass of something, a bath towel cleans it up a lot faster than a roll of paper towels.

Depends on what that something is.  If it's other than water, like milk, I don't want some nasty milk-soaked rag laying around until I do laundry again.  If it's the weekend and I'm going to do a load anyways, no big deal for cloth, otherwise, paper towels for that mess. 

In that situation I would probably give the old towel a quick rinse in the bathtub so it doesn't smell, and put it in the next load of laundry.

Yeah that is probably what I would do as well... I think I did have to mop up some milk with a towel relatively recently (not bath-towel quantities, because I only use milk for coffee so we usually only have quarts in the house), and I rinsed it out in the sink.

Considering how rarely we have truly gross things to clean up, I just don't worry too much about the paper towel/towel thing. Like, I would be willing to sacrifice one of the old towels to the trash if I had to clean up poop or vomit with it. But we don't have kids or pets, so that probably cuts down on our gross fluids cleanup budget just in general.

[J Boogie]

we don't have our own washing machine (basement laundromat in the block of flats)

I think the paper vs cloth towel thing falls along the fault lines of the urban yuppie mustachians in rentals vs the settled in, homesteading & canning mustachians.

Coin laundry adds up so fast.  $1.50 to wash, and then you jam all the clothes that'll fit in there and when you go to dry them they don't all fit on your drying rack and they don't get dry in one cycle on the dryer either... Then of course the whole out of quarters have to find a bank/store nearby that'll give you quarters... at 10pm... Man, it's nice owning laundry machines.

[Rosy]

Sometimes I feel like this is a generational thing.  Both our parents are baby boomers and they generally come to visit the owls once a year (which is more than enough).  We try to avoid using paper towels as much as possible by ourselves, probably going through a roll every couple months.  We use cloth handkerchiefs and wash them every week or so.  But when the boomers come to visit....

...HEAVEN FORBID IF THERE AREN'T ENOUGH PAPER TOWELS ON TAP.  By the end of their two-day stay they've gone through an entire roll and my trash is completely full of paper.  They start to go mad if we don't replace the empty roll right away for them.  It's like they don't know what to do.  So we just assume it's some generational thing where boomers were the first group to have access to these easy throw-away towels and they can't fathom using a reusable towel.  When they went down to view the million dollar basement one of the first observations was that we didn't have a paper towel roll on the counter top.  F*&k-off boomers, we're not putting one down there.  Deal with it.

Between recycling, composting and not using paper towels, we maybe fill up 3/4 of a trash bag a week.  And even that's often just because we have packaging from meat or chicken that gets put in the freezer during the week and gets thrown out when we go to the dump on Friday afternoons.

LOL - baby boomer here. I always thought it was more of an American thing to rely so heavily on paper towels. I grew up in Europe and while my 87 yr old mother now has and uses a roll of paper towels - with a matching print for her kitchen of course:) - I grew up without them. My MIL in the states used them sparingly as well.

We use the select-a-size because Mr. R. is convinced it saves money - I've never told him this, but they drive me nuts and I regularly use two instead of one:) I mean - really, I want to clean up a mess, not have it on my fingers.
We always have two kitchen towels in use - one for your hands and another for drying dishes or wiping an already clean surface - to dry. It took him a while to learn that no, we don't use a regular towel on something that will forever stain that towel:) He was only using paper towels before.

I'm an addict to re-usable micro fiber clothes to the point that I have designated ones for glass and TV and others for dusting and a different kind for floor or serious clean up. Most of them last forever and don't leave fuzzballs and in my opinion well worth it - I have a huge stash of them - enough for the next ten years for sure.

Edited to add: To answer the OPs question - paper towels are not mustachian at all. Sure, you can compost them, but a real towel is still the best mustachian option.
We can easily live without them, they are nothing but a well marketed, modern convenience. The argument that there is an extra cost to them, because you have to wash them is ludicrous - who doesn't have room to throw in a dish towel? Besides, we line dry. 

[Ricky]

I liken paper towels to most other basic modern conveniences. You could live without a LOT of things - it's just far more convenient and easy not to.

I couldn't imagine letting my bacon sit on cloth towels and then cleaning the grease out of the pans - and then throwing those in the washing machine? Or cleaning crap up off the floor. Plus I really don't have the room to store a bunch of dirty towels.

Then again, I've always grown up with an abundance of paper towels and don't know any other way.

[LouLou]

I switched to real towels and I love them!  I purchased 30 very absorbent microfiber hand towels, and have them folded in baskets in the kitchen and bathrooms on the counters.  The kitchen ones are white, so food stains are bleached right out.  I have a empty basket in the kitchen.  The towels dry quickly so there are no lingering food smells. 

I love the convenience, because I never run out of towels.  I do laundry once a week, and the towels are thrown in with the existing loads.  I keep a few rolls of paper towels for bacon grease on occasion.  I use toilet paper for cat poop situations.  I use paper napkins for big parties. 

I love having one less thing to buy.

[NoraLenderbee]

I call them "cleaning rags" and I've always used them, as my mother did. Paper towels are a nice convenience for draining bacon and picking up cat poop, but regular cleaning is done with cloth. Old cotton underwear (the best), T-shirts, old towels, cotton socks, etc., etc. We also have kitchen towels (not rags) for wiping the counter, drying hands, etc.

[coppertop]

I am reminded of when I was in my 20s back in the late 70s and we visited my former in-laws.  My mother-in-law chided me for drying my hands on a cloth kitchen towel rather than using a paper towel - she informed me that cloth towels were for dishes and not for hands.  My former in-laws were very anti-Mustachian. 

[mskyle]

we don't have our own washing machine (basement laundromat in the block of flats)

I think the paper vs cloth towel thing falls along the fault lines of the urban yuppie mustachians in rentals vs the settled in, homesteading & canning mustachians.

Coin laundry adds up so fast.  $1.50 to wash, and then you jam all the clothes that'll fit in there and when you go to dry them they don't all fit on your drying rack and they don't get dry in one cycle on the dryer either... Then of course the whole out of quarters have to find a bank/store nearby that'll give you quarters... at 10pm... Man, it's nice owning laundry machines.

$1.50 to wash! Spoken like someone who hasn't been to the laundromat in a while... :P

I still use cloth towels, napkins, etc., even though I do use the laundromat, and honestly it might end up costing the same or more than just using paper towels. It feels way more convenient to me, though - for one thing, my apartment has almost no closet space/dry storage space (we have a huge, very wet basement). So storing bulky things like paper towels is a real pain in the ass.

[HipGnosis]

I was in the hardware store recently.  This particular store has a 'as seen on TV section' (they also sell quite a bit of household stuff).
They have packages of single bamboo towels.