Towels

I'm attempting to be more sustainable and minimalistic for a few reasons:

-Using fewer resources is better for the environment.

-Having fewer things takes up less space, allowing me to live in a smaller place that costs less, is cheaper to heat/cool and maintain, easier to clean and overall uses less resources.

-Buying less saves money which I can then use on the things that I really want to do and enables me to work less.

I'll look at how I do different things and try to deconstruct it in order to come up with more efficient ways of doing it instead. This process helps me to change my habits. Any comments or suggestions for how to make it even better are highly welcome. It is my hope that this can lead to others also thinking about how they can use fewer and more sustainable resources as well.

One of the habits where I have already used the 3 R's (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) is for my showering routine. This post is about towels for drying off after showering.

Instead of using full size towels, I now use a small face towel / wash cloth to dry myself after showering. It absorbs all the water from my body and (short) hair and is easy to wring out and hang to dry on the shower curtain rod.







It works just as well as using a full size towel and has a number of advantages:

-much cheaper, saving me money to use on other things, like traveling.

-much lighter and takes up much less space, allowing me to need less space for storage of spare towels.













-Takes up much less space when being washed and dries much faster.

The only disadvantage I can think of is that it is difficult to cover one self in a decent way with a small face towel, if someone comes across you "au natural" ;-p

I currently have 4-5 small face towels, which I will try to pare down to 1-2 as they find other uses. Each towel can easily be used for weeks at a time without feeling dirty or smelly, and it only takes up very little space when it is finally washed and dries fast. I think the current ones I have are cotton. They used to be white, but an unfortunate smelting accident (new red shirt and white wash cloth washed together is not a good idea ;-)

One improvement could be to get special fabric that is much more absorbent and lower weight. http://www.zpacks.com/accessories/towel.shtml

Another could be to get bamboo wash cloths. These are organic and sustainable.

At some point I will experiment with these, but as I already have wash cloths that do the job, throwing them away to get new fancier ones would be using more resources, not fewer.

From an economical point of view, inspired by Tim Ferriss in his books "The 4 hour workweek" and "The 4 hour body," if you can get 80 % of the result from something that only takes 20 % of the resources, then it is worth doing. So being vastly more expensive wash cloths for a just slightly better performance might not be worth it.

I'll love to hear any suggestions or comments on how I can make the drying after shower routine even better.