My family (and maybe your family) are killing trees in one fast swoop

The other night I went to a family dinner at my dad’s house. There were maybe 15 people there. We had pizza (good), salad (good), ice cream cake (even better) and LOADS of paper napkins. Oh my.

At my own house, all we use are cloth napkins. We’ve never used paper napkins, and we don’t even use paper towels. I was a little shocked about all the paper napkin use at dinner the other night, and almost considered wiping my hands on my jeans just to cut down on the excess. On a given day, (not a family dinner night) there are still about 5-8 random people at my dad’s. If you do the lowest math that’s about 5 people x’s three meals and snacks a day. That’s possibly:

• 20 paper napkins a day.
• 140 paper napkins a week.
• 7,280 paper napkins a year! For ONE household. Not to mention the family dinners.

Wow right?

How many trees is that affecting? Let’s use a basic bulk pack of Bounty Quilted Napkins, 100-Napkin Packages (Pack of 20) for our calculations. If you buy in bulk, that’s about 12 pounds of paper napkins. In my family, you’d need about 3.5+ bulk packs for the year.

Semi-fuzzy math calculations:

Conservatree notes that paper calculations are tricky, but they offer some estimates. One estimate is that it would take a rough average of 24 trees to produce a ton of printing and writing paper. It’s harder to find calculations for napkins.

The NRDC notes that “If every household in the United States replaced just one package of virgin fiber napkins (250 count) with 100% recycled ones, we could save 1 million trees.” Obviously, if all households used only cloth napkins, those 1 million trees saved would grow to many million.

There are 2000 pounds per 1 ton, and I found one calculation that estimates that it takes about 3.84 trees to make 2000 pounds of paper. My family is using about 42 pounds a year of paper napkins, which granted seems ok, that’s not even one whole tree. BUT what about all those other families using paper napkins? It would take about 47 families (with five members) to kill around four trees yearly with paper napkin use. That’s a fairly typical neighborhood size, and smaller than most apartment complexes.

The current U.S. population count is 305,837,897. If just half of this count uses paper napkins daily that’s 1092 napkins a year per person; 166,987,491,762 napkins a year total; 83,493,745 packs of napkins (bulk) a year; 1,001,924,950 pounds of napkins a year; 500,962 tons of napkins a year; which kills about what? 1,923,695 trees a year.

Why bother adding this all up?:

So, I’m hoping my math is close. I did the above calculations fairly quickly. And yeah, the figures above would be more accurate if I had some sort of paper napkin weighing lab, a math genius, and some tree mill company to help me out, but overall, the basic idea is clear – paper napkins waste WAY too many trees.

Imagine if everyone used cloth napkins? It would be a HUGE change for the better. Later tips for folks who want to argue that cloth napkins waste water and electricity, plus some cloth napkin options, ideas about how cloth napkins save you cash, and maybe some other paper napkin alternatives.

Does your household use paper napkins or cloth?