Corduroy Orange

I like to reduce wasteful consumption in my life wherever I can. Even a small meal can burn through paper napkins quickly. That’s why I try to carry my own cloth napkin with me—my disposability factor drops substantially when I’m not wasting squares of paper by wiping my grubby paws on them.

Because disposability is a cultural phenomenon, it’s going to take a cultural counter-phenomenon to reverse the tide. Start by carrying your own napkin with you to lunch. If you act now, I’ll provide you with one at absolutely no cost. That’s right, it can be yours for 0 payments of $0.00. Shipping and handling is included. Simply email your name and mailing address to
sustainable_napkin{at}corduroyorange{dot}com,
and if you’re one of the first two dozen people to do so, I’ll send you a cloth napkin for your lunchtime use. These napkins are irregularly sized, but none is smaller than 12 inches square, the approximate size of your standard, 2-ply paper napkin that dissolves under the slightest spill, prompting you to use at least three of them if you need one. Banish that waste from your life forever.

The napkins are sewn from odd pieces left over from Aurora and I having converted her sister’s wedding banquet tablecloths into appropriately-sized tablecloths and napkins for the bride and groom. The edges are serged and should not fray, even under extended use. Under normal circumstances, you should be able to go a whole workweek between washes, and to last for several years.

As such, regular use of the sustainable cloth napkin could easily translate into your keeping more than 2,200 paper squares out of the landfill a year—and that’s just based on it being used at lunches. Use a cloth napkin for breakfasts and dinners, and you can save at least 4,500 paper napkins a year. That means as a group, twenty-five people have the capacity to keep more than 112,000 napkins out of the trash on an annual basis. And that’s just with 25 people… the more converts there are, the less America wastes.

These napkins will be orange in color as soon as I get around to dying them, but otherwise will have no reference to the website… so you don’t have to worry about unwittingly being a marketing tool. However, if your friends and co-workers ask you, “what’s up with the napkin?”, feel free to let them know about the site and encourage them to join the sustainable napkin movement.

I’m not selling anything, and I don’t want your money. I just want people everywhere to waste as little as we possibly can, because as a whole, we waste and throw away way too much. If there are areas where we can reduce our consumption through easy steps, it’s a no-brainer that we should do so.

Please allow 2-4 weeks for delivery.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 1st, 2007 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Sustainable Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.