A Quest for Ethical (part 2)

As a household, we have been trying to reduce our waste.  We recycle whatever we can.  This year we got permission to put our compost in our townhouse complex's greens disposal bin.  We use cloth diapers for our son.  But we still want to reduce our waste even more.  One way to do that is pay attention to what different things we throw in the garbage.  There are a few key culprits that still fill up our trash bin.  Here is the one that I have been working on lately:

Facial tissue (commonly known as klenex)

Tissues are something I used to just take for granted, but I started to notice how much they were filling up our garbage, especially when we all came down with colds a few weeks ago.  That got me thinking about the fact that tissues haven't been around for all that long, in the grand scale of things.  According to Wikipedia, Klenexes were introduced in the west in 1924.  So I decided to give something else a try.

Handkerchiefs!  Those things of legend.  Extremely valuable to all adventurers, whether peasant, princess, or hobbit.  They seem to show up a lot in stories, at any rate.  And as the stories attest, they have many more uses than simply being nose-wipers.  I decided I would make some "reusable klenexes" to have around the house.

As far as sewing projects go, this is about as easy as it gets.

I bought a couple 50 cent receiving blankets at a local thrift store, and cut them into smaller squares, and did a zigzag stitch around the edge of each handkerchief.

That's it!

I put them in these fabric boxes, ready to be used!  Right now we have one box in our bedroom and one in the living room.

So far the handkerchiefs seem to serve their purpose well, and are easy to throw in with any load of laundry once used.  We will see how they hold up the next time we all get sick! 

Edit: I just thought of another perk of using handkerchiefs - you don't need to keep checking pockets for those stray tissues that end up in the wash and get stuck over everything!  Hooray!