I bought treeless paper towels....

Did you know that there are paper towels that are made out of other materials besides trees? Tree free paper products are a thing! Apparently they can be made with bamboo, quick growing grass and sugarcane products. I didn't know that until I accidentally bought some!

My adventure with this product started innocently enough. I was in a discount outlet and I saw a pallet of paper towels marked 2 for $1. That's a great price for paper towels, but not knowing the quality....I wasn't sure if it was worth it.

I thought about it a second and decided that since hubby uses paper towels in the garage for spills and such, I should get a few rolls for garage towels. Any quality will work for garage messes. Into the cart they went and that should be that. Right? Except I hadn't read the package, and when I finally did 2 weeks later it kinda stopped me in my tracks.

Treeless paper towels

That's right, these paper towels are NOT made of tree products. Hmmmm. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I'm sure sugar cane and bamboo can grow a lot faster than it takes to grow a whole tree. This is definitely a more sustainable product then traditional paper towels, plus I love earth friendly products. No matter how much of a good idea something is though, it needs to work too. So, do they work? Yes! While they may not be the 'quicker picker upper' they certainly work well enough for standard use.

Bamboo paper towels

They feel like normal paper towels and they act like normal paper towels. I had some weird notion that they would be sticky or gooey feeling when wet, but they aren't. They are just like normal paper towels but without the deforestation. Bonus! Unfortunately they're not reusable like the unpaper towels many people are making right now, but certain messes (like garage oil) need cleaned up in a disposable way, so they do come in handy!

Of course I had to look up the website for the Green 2 brand and I found that these towels...are made from two renewable and sustainable resources. These two resources are sugar cane husk and bamboo grass.

Sugar cane is the largest agricultural crop in the world. As it is developed for what we call sugar, it also produces a byproduct called bagasse. When sugar cane is crushed, the bagasse is extracted and can be used for bio energy or as a pulp for paper products. Sugar cane can grow back to its original height in as little as 12 months.

Bamboo grass is another renewable resource that can be harvested for the production of treeless paper. Bamboo grass can grow up to three inches in one day. It can regenerate to its full growth in as little as six months.

Now that is seriously cool!

So let's take this in another direction and ask....would I buy them again? At that price, yes. I'd even pay twice that, however products like this are normally on the higher end of the price scale and that's where I'd probably take a pass on them. I did find them here on Amazon, but you have to order 48 rolls at a time. However, it comes out to just over $2 a roll and has free prime shipping so it's really not a bad deal at all if you have the storage room for treeless paper towels.

Either way, I'm glad to see products like this being developed even if they do end up in the bargain outlet. It's important that we support new products aimed at reducing our carbon footprints....and this is where I get to tell you that I am so sad that I only grabbed 4 rolls that day. Had I known what I was buying, I would have definitely bought more!

~L

Update: Since a roll of these non paper towels has been living in the garage, a mouse has decided to shred them and use them to line her nest. lol Apparently not even the wildlife can tell the difference!

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(This post contains affiliate links. If you chose to purchase something through the link, I will get a small payment from Amazon. It will not affect your purchase price. Click for full disclosure.)