Going back to the old fashioned handkerchief

Whenever I see giant packages of disposable products, I can't help but think of the John Muir quote: 

This is creation. All this is going on today, only men are blind to see it. They think only of food. They are not content to provide three meals a day; they must have enough for a thousand meals. And so they build ships to carry the food that they call commerce, and they build houses to store food in, and other houses to buy and sell it in, and houses to eat it in, and load themselves down with the care of it so that they cannot get away. They can not pause long enough to go out into the wilderness where God has provided every sparrow enough to eat and to spare, and contemplate for even an hour the wonderful world that they live in.

Over the past 70 years, the size of the American house has doubled.  While more serious thinkers may have other theories about why this is, one of mine is that we need more space to store giant packages of stuff that we are going to use once and throw away. Then, bigger houses lead to more land use, more energy use and more driving because of the lower density of neighborhoods.

One of the most important reasons for reuse and repurposing is to use resources in a sustainable way. However, it does also have the advantage of taking less space (as long as you don't hang on to things you truly don't use).  Because we cut up old clothes and fabric scraps into rags that can be washed, we only store one extra roll of paper towel at at time.  We use cloth napkins so we don't store a lot of those either. 

Last year, I also started using old fashioned handkerchiefs for use at home (we are in the  middle of a pandemic so I get why we use paper products in public spaces). Tissue paper has been the mode of choice for blowing one's nose for most of my life, but we always brought handkerchiefs as gifts when we went to India in the 1970s and 1980s.   

I made some out of an old bed sheet.  Besides taking less space than boxes of tissue, one of biggest advantages of handkerchief is that they don't make a complete mess in the wash when you accidentally leave one in your pocket!