How Green Living Saves You Money: Napkin Example

In the previous money related post I talked about why being green is so expensive – and sort of how it’s not, on a grander scale.

Like I said in my previous post, I’m willing to make changes in my life so that I can buy green products, even when they’re more expensive. You can omit quite a few products from your life than totally gets rid of the need for green or conventional products – like you don’t need separate cleanser for the tub and toilet. However, there are some products you can’t do without, or at least I haven’t been able to figure out how. Items like toilet paper, soap, dish washing detergent, organic produce, recycled computer paper, and so on are items you may need, and should buy green, but, it’ll cost you.

To balance the costs I’m going to start sharing some green things that will save you money so that you can buy the products that are necessary. I’ll try to include calculations when possible to make it more realistic.

Today let’s start with an obvious one…

Use cloth napkins instead of buying paper – I’ve never bought paper napkins in my entire life, so I honestly did not know what they cost. My mom used cloth, I’ve always used cloth, so I looked it up. You can get 400 conventional paper napkins for $35.99 at Amazon. In a family of four that’s three (at least) meal times a day. In a year the four of you would eat around 1095 meals together. Using four napkins per meal equals 4380 napkins or almost 11 packs of napkins per year. Which amounts to about $400.00 a year in paper napkins. That’s if you only use one each per meal.

Now, if you buy everyone in your family of four enough organic cotton napkins for three days worth of meals you’d need a set of 36 cloth napkins. I’m assuming you don’t want to wash them every day, so I figured in enough for about three days. I found some nice ones for $22.99 which means you’ll spend a total of $206.00 for the napkins. I’ve seen organic napkins for less though, and also you could skip the organic and pick up 36 nice thrift store napkins for about $1-2 each, making your total cost about $72.00 at the most plus gas to drive to the the thrift store.

In one year you can save anywhere from $194 to $364 by using cloth napkins.

However, you also have to factor in usage and water and energy costs.

Personally I think it’s dumb to use the old argument, “But I have to wash them – that costs water and energy!” If you’ve ever washed cloth napkins you’ll know that they use up almost no space in your washer. 36 napkins won’t even amount to a small load. I always throw them in with my other laundry, which frankly, I have to wash anyhow, so water, soap, and energy costs are a moot point.

If you want to argue this though we can. I checked around and there are different estimates on how much it costs to wash one load of laundry on cold using your dryer set on medium to dry. The costs ranged from about 12 cents to 34 cents depending on where I looked. We’ll use the top range; 34 cents.

According to the book The Tightwad Gazette, it takes about 200 napkins in your typical sized washer to make a full load. That’s worth washing your own set of 36 napkins about 5 times, or about 24 full loads of napkins per year, which works out to around $8.00 a year – even if you add in soap costs, it’s clear that washing cloth napkins can’t outweigh the costs of buying paper. You’re still saving a ton of money.

Then you have to factor in the savings from long-term use. I’ve had cloth napkins my whole life, and the typical life span is four to five years of hard core use as napkins, and then I use them for another two years as cleaning rags, which saves the cost of paper towels.

Let’s add it all up:

Four year’s worth of organic cloth napkins for a family of four =

• $206.00 initial cost
• About $50 for four years worth of washing (and I rounded up big time for soap use and energy fluctuation)
• Total cost of nice organic cloth napkins for four years = $256.00

Four year’s worth of disposable paper napkins for a family of four =

• $1,600 ongoing purchase costs
• $143 the extra costs of one extra pack a year, because anyone with little kids is lying if they say they really only use one napkin each per every single meal.
• Total cost of basic paper napkins for four years = $1,743

Savings with cloth napkins over four years = $1,487

In other words, enough right there to buy all the organic apples and bleach free detergent you need.

Don’t forget, I use the cloth napkins for about 1-2 years to clean, which is an additional savings of hundreds of dollars in paper towels. I also calculated using the nicer organic napkins but you can get nice ones for a fraction of that at thrift stores. Also, we haven’t even discussed how many trees I saved using cloth. The actual savings are much more far reaching than simply monetary costs. If you use recycled paper napkins you pay about $600 a year so this is one case where using recycled won’t help you out. Recycled napkins actually make cloth look even better because over four years you save $2,194 by using cloth over recycled.

Whew, I hope someone finds this useful, because seriously all this math has shot my brain. Have I convinced you to switch to cloth napkins or do you have a good argument for paper?