For many, paper towels have become a ‘can’t live without them’ item.
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From kitchens to bathrooms, you could probably find a roll of paper towels in almost every home in America.
But who invented paper towels and how did they become so indispensable?
How paper towels are made?
Who are the major brands of paper towels?
Can paper towels go into the microwave?
Can paper towels scratch glass?
Can paper towels be recycled?
Why paper towels are bad for the environment?
Today, I am going to answer these common questions about paper towels.
Let’s dive right in.
Before paper towels, we used cloth towels to both dry our hands and clean up our messes.
The idea for the paper towel originally came from Clarence and Irvin Scott brothers in .
They had created a thinner version of the towel we know and love today.
It was first created to be used for medical reasons, as a light toilet tissue.
Then one day, in , Irvin’s son Arthur had an issue.
A truckload of toilet tissue arrived at his factory, which was way too thick for the very delicate product they’d become known for.
Instead of sending it back and wasting the product, he found another use for the tissue.
He’d heard a story from a local teacher who would give sick children pieces of paper to dry their hands so they wouldn’t contaminate the communal washroom cloth towels. That’s a smart lady!
Inspired, he had the accidentally thicker tissue reformed into towel-sized sheets and sold it as disposable paper towels instead of cloth towels to dry hands in washrooms.
The invention was accidental, sure, but a medical success!
It would help stop the spread of colds and diseases. No more communal cloth towels contaminated with teeny tiny germs.
The first paper towel was named Sani-Towel and was sold to restaurants, hotels, and railroad stations and distributed in their washrooms.
Then in , Arthur had another lightbulb idea.
He introduced the Sani-Towel to the kitchen, which was when the concept of the paper towel as we know it truly came to life.
At first, people were hesitant to use this unfamiliar product.
It took years for behaviors to change and for paper towels to be accepted with open arms and dirty dishes.
Paper towels are made from either virgin or recycled paper pulp which is extracted from wood or fiber crops.
They are sometimes bleached during the production process to lighten coloration and may also be decorated with colored images on each square (such as flowers or teddy bears).
Resin size is used to improve the wet strength
If these details look complicated, here is a 60-second video of how paper towels are made:
Let’s look at some major brands in the paper towel industry that are manufactured in the United States of America according to this website:
Scott® brand paper towels are made in America. The Kimberly-Clark corporation manufactures them in various facilities across the United States, including sites in Chester, Pennsylvania; Jenks, Oklahoma; and Beech Island, South Carolina.
Bounty paper towels are made in a variety of locations. The manufacturer says these include Mehoopany, Pennsylvania; Albany, Georgia; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; and Oxnard, California.
CVS Earth Essentials paper towels are made in the USA, according to the CVS website. They are made from 100 percent recycled content.
Viva paper towels come from American plants in locations such as Jenks, Oklahoma; Marinette, Wisconsin; and Beech Island, South Carolina. These locations were provided to me by a company representative.
Sparkle® paper towels are also made in the USA. A company spokesperson tells me they are manufactured in Hey Heather. Sparkle is manufactured at Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Oregon facilities.
Most paper towels are microwave safe. In fact, you can use a paper towel to cover some foods so they don’t spit during cooking or reheating.
If you do use a paper towel while microwaving, it’s best to use shorter intervals so you can check both the food and the paper more frequently.
Recycled paper towels, paper towels with printing, and brown paper bags should not be used as they pose a potential safety hazard.
The goal of cleaning mirrors, windows, and any glass, really, is a sparkling clean surface without a speck or smear to obstruct your view.
Paper towels sabotage that goal by leaving behind lint.
Opt for reusable paper towels, or an old t-shirt instead of paper towels whenever you want to clean glass.
Paper towels, napkins, paper plates, and tissues are all paper products, however, they are never recyclable.
Because they usually come in contact with food wastes, greases, and possibly bodily fluids, they are not able to be “cleaned” during the recycling process and should not be with other “clean” paper waste like magazines and copy paper.
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Always throw these items into the trash. Note: Even unused napkins and plates should not be recycled.
However, they should be used for something before they are thrown away. (Tissue boxes and paper towel cores are recyclable with paper).
1. Paper Towels cannot be recycled
Paper towels are classified as contaminated waste and end up in landfills. Every time.
Although paper towels can be made from recycled paper, they are usually the last paper product to be made in the chain. This means the paper they are made from has been recycled up to seven times before, so the fibers are too short in paper towels to be used again.
2. Decomposing paper towels contribute to global warming
In the USA alone, 6,500,000 tons of paper towels are sent to landfills each year. The decay of paper products produces methane gas which is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. This is creating a significant threat to global warming.
Worse still, paper towels are often put in plastic bags, creating further problems in landfills.
3. The average paper towel generates 7.5gms/CO2 or 22.5 gms/CO2 per dry.
Life Cycle analysis shows that the effects of felling raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, packaging, and storage, produce a significant amount of CO2.
To make one ton of paper towels, 17 trees are cut down and 75,700 liters of water are consumed and polluted.
4. Paper Towels are one of the biggest causes of blocked drains
Facilities managers constantly tell us that the reason they switch to hand dryers is that they are fed up with paper towels blocking the toilets.
People like to use them as toilet seat covers for better protection than thin toilet tissue.
Unfortunately, the fibers don’t break down like tissue and blockages always occur.
All of these are the environmental effects of paper towels.
If you want to reduce your paper towel waste and save the environment and your money, then reusable paper towels are a great option.
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The company was born in . Being passionate about the ecological lifestyle, we were inspired by the planet’s current need to create in-demand, sustainable and ecological products that reduce everyone’s carbon footprint.
Our main goal is to produce natural, eco-friendly alternatives for household disposables.
Rather than wasting your money and time, you can choose to save these for your future.
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A true zero-waste lifestyle is not for everyone, but with our products, living in a more eco-responsible way by taking small daily actions becomes much easier.
You can buy our natural bamboo fiber and bamboo rayon reusable paper towels from our website.
In this column Cecil cites our own Una Persson to prove that paper towels use more energy than electrical hand blowers. No offense meant, wouldn’t it have been just as easy to cite her actual calculations rather than her not inconsiderable authority? I’ve seen this factoid bandied about in the past, and in most of the calculations they assume that virgin bleached fiber is used to produce paper, but fail to take into consideration the energy produced during the recovery process.
From this cite there is a total electrical production of 655 kWh of electricity per air dry ton (ADT) of pulp produced. The actual pulping processes consume less than this amount, so pulp mills are net exporters of energy, generating 17 kWh net energy per ADT of pulp. This applies to bleached white pulp.
If the pulp produced is the unbleached kraft pulp like that used in most hand towels the net electrical production is an additional 175 kWh/ADT. Look at Table I in the linked cite and you can deduct the amount used on oxygen delignification and bleaching. In that case you would generate slightly less energy because O2 delig produces dissolved wood for the boilers, but the energy penalty is miniscule compared to the 175 kWh/ADT saved.
Paper making would use more energy than the 141 kWh/ADT than listed for the pulp machine, but most mills are integrated, so you wouldn’t have to have both, just one or the other.
I agree that all paper mills have power generation equipment using wood waste, coal, or natural gas, and sometimes all three, switching from one to the other as the price of each fluctuates. I’m just questioning what the calculations show for the net energy consumption of an integrated mill producing hand towels. As Una knows quite well, in engineering it’s often a question about where to draw the box. I just want to make sure it’s drawn in the right place.
Now, if you were talking about fine papers, bleached to 94 ISO brightness and coated to a fare thee well, that would be different, but nobody dries their hands with stationary.
I have limited time online in the next week, but I feel I should give you some more information to consider.
Cecil has but 800 words per week to fit his column into, and he writes for an audience which, while smarter than most, is largely non-technical. As a result, sometimes detailed calculations are not spelled out in the articles.
Your skepticism is good - but note as well that Cecil does not just rely on any one person for his analyses. He has other fact-checkers available to cross-check consumptions and sources as well, as I can attest due to some errors they found in some of my initial calculations. Cecil rarely, if ever, relies on just a single source of info.
From your own cite, going forward a little bit, one can see that newsprint paper (as an example of a “rougher” paper) takes an energy of kWh/ADt for TMP, and 790 kWh/ADt for DIP (recycled), and using an 80/20 ratio you get about kWh/ADt. However, I looked at a large number of sources, as well as talked to personnel at a paper company who I’ve worked for which makes both paper towels and cardboard (who would not give me exact numbers, but who said that kWh/ADt was “in the ballpark” for towels as well, but for a “good-running, modern mill” - of course the sad thing is, many mills are not running at near the efficiency they actually should, due to the cheapness of power. The Canadian paper you cite, which was actually one of the first ones I read in helping to investigate this, is referring to a “modern” mill in what I and others were assuming was a relatively new condition.), and ended up with a range of energy production values from a low of kWh/ADt to a high of kWh/ADt (assumed corrugated, unbleached paper, so not totally the same thing). What I did was a sensitivity analysis over a range of assumed paper energy consumptions. Note as well that many sites online claim to include the logging, transport, transloading, hogging, and other costs including waste and effluent disposal, which likely explains the large ranges. I tried to dig into what the breakdown was for the harvesting to chipping process was, spending a very large amount of time talking to renewable energy folks and reading USFS papers, but was unable to come up with a number I felt confident of using. Depending upon the State, location, and type of wood source, the renewable energy supply coordinators I worked with gave me appallingly large differences from “best case” to “worst case” cost and energy consumption. I don’t recall the numbers per hogged ton of wood chips, but the ratio was along the lines of 10:1.
Operation times for conventional dryers range from 15 seconds to 60 seconds, and there are about 3 standard power outputs, so as a result there was about a 1:3 difference in power consumed while running. So I graphed the possible ranges of power consumption from those cases. In each case, I took the most likely case which I judged, and compared the two.
My sheet has several things in it which it tries to take into account, including the transport energy of the new paper, the disposal energy of wet/used paper, etc., including some possibly proprietary info, but I can run a few quick numbers. For an example, if we assume a 1.5kW dryer at 20 seconds cycle time, then the break-even for the paper case is about kWh/ADt. The outlier of course was the Dyson - if you can accept the level of drying achievable from it, its power consumption is very low. The break-even in terms of the paper case is then reduced to 748 kWh/ADt.
That’s about all I can say right now on this.
In the case of the thermomechanical pulp cited, I certainly believe the energy usage is high. TMP is groundwood, in which mechanical and thermal energy is used to break up wood into fiber. It is an energy hog because it operates in yields so high that there is no energy produced in the recovery boilers, in fact, there are no recovery boilers. It’s cheaper in wood cost, everything’s a tradeoff. The company I work for is no longer in the groundwood business for various reasons, but the cost of energy is among them.
However, I would like to leave you with this The value of electrical energy is around $0.12 per kWh. I know this is more than the cost of production, but if you can’t get 12 cents worth of value out of using it you would sell it instead of using it to make paper.
If we were at the kWh/ADT break even price that means the electrical cost of a ton of paper is $170. The August 14th price for NBSK (Northern Bleached Softwood Kraft) was only $830/ADMT, or $753/ADT. I promise you that if it took $180 worth of electricity to make $750 worth of pulp not a paper company in the world would be in business.
Up to the headbox of the paper machine, the largest single cost of paper production is the cost of fiber, purchasing trees. Following that comes labor, or labour for the Anglophiles, with energy either third, or fourth, depending on how old the mill is and whether you’ve recovered the capital invested or have to amortize the cost of equipment, which is ruinously high. A new pulp mill in a size large enough to be economically feasible to run would cost in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion. The “b” is not a typo.
Chemicals are in there as well, but most pulping chemicals are recovered, with soda losses being on the order of 20 pounds per ADT, and most of the energy cost of bleaching, which is already accounted for, is in the generation of chlorine dioxide on site.
Paper mills work hard on saving energy, because the marginal cost of power can make or break an operation. Try to find a paper mill in the Pacific Northwest lately. Those high electric prices combined with high wood costs drove them all out of business.
Anyway, my point, and I do have one, is that electrical costs are much lower than I have seen calculated, and without revealing proprietary information, I can safely say that net energy consumption for brown kraft paper towels is much less than the kWh/ADT.
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