A common waste item in the kitchen is paper towels. Often used to wipe up food and other messes, keeping them out of landfills would be great. Let’s talk about how can you compost paper towels and when.
First, white paper towels can not be composted. The white color comes from a bleaching process that doesn’t compost well. If you’re doing vermicomposting, it can hurt the worms. After all, who wants to eat bleach?
Paper towels can normally be composted.
However, to compost a paper towel, ensure it was only used to clean up the water or food waste. You don’t want to compost a paper towel if it was used to clean up grease or cleaning fluids. Grease interferes with the composting process, reducing the oxygen available. Cleaning products are, well, cleaning products and don’t do good things to compost.
One catch on the food waste – if you used the paper towel for meat or dairy, it could attract pests in the compost pile. Meat and dairy aren’t great for compost, so you might not want to compost these paper towels.
Summarizing – Can I Compost Paper Towels
Hopefully, this will provide you with a quick guide to determining if you can compost a paper towel.
- Is it a bamboo paper towel?
- Does it have rayon in it? No
- Otherwise – Yes
- For other paper towels –
- Was it used to clean up water? Yes
- Was it used to clean up food? Yes
- Was it used to clean up grease or oil? No
- Was it used to clean up a cleaning product? No
- Used for anything else? No just to be safe
How You Can Compost Paper Towels
As with many things when composting, it’s best to rip up the paper towel into small pieces. A full-size piece of paper towel will eventually break down but making smaller pieces helps to speed up the process.
It’s a good idea to layer brown material, like paper towels, between layers of green material. You also want to be careful that they don’t remove too much moisture from your compost pile. You may want to add some water to keep them moist within the compost pile.
Layer your brown material with green material. Make sure that you turn your compost regularly.
The Benefits of Composting Paper Towels
The good news is that paper towels usually break down pretty quickly in landfills. The problem is really with the number of paper towels that we use. We use more than 13 billion pounds of paper towels in the United States annually. No matter how quickly they break down, the sheer volume of paper towels makes this waste a problem. Of course, if you have paper towels, you can reduce some of this waste while helping your compost pile with some brown (nitrogen) material. It might also be worth considering reusable paper towels and avoiding the waste altogether.