The Deeper Meaning of Family Cloth

A post and comments on two blogs that I regularly read made me mull over our choice to use family cloth (aka family wipes or cloth tp). The reason behind it is not simply to be thrifty. We have three girls and one mom in our family (the dad, of course, doesn’t go through nearly as much as we four females do). That adds up to a lot of toilet paper use. One day about two years ago as I was replacing yet another roll of toilet paper, I thought how much we were going through and how much paper and waste and money it added up to. I also remembered a post about family cloth that I had recently read on an email list. When I thought that I had all the materials we already needed for wipes and with the addition of two waste baskets and two smaller baskets, we would be set, I decided to at least try it. I knew that I wouldn’t need to convince Lawrence too much, because I am so lucky to be blessed with a guy who goes along with my most of my kooky whims fairly easily. Considering that we already used cloth diapers, cloth diaper wipes, and I use cloth menstrual pads, it wasn’t such a stretch to add this anyway.

I cut up old t-shirts that had holes and were just hanging in our closets taking up space. Threw them in their new wicker baskets and told everyone the new protocol. Sure, those first few weeks there were wipes that ended up in the toilet, but everyone made the switch easily. We found out something interesting. We liked cloth wipes much better than toilet paper. They are so soft and more durable so you need less to get the job done. You can also moisten them with warm water and they don’t disintegrate. So, here we are two years later with no plans to go back to toilet paper. We still keep a roll in each bathroom for guests to use or if we run out of clean wipes between launderings. In those two years I would calculate that we have saved a little over 700 rolls of toilet paper from use and saved at least $300 and countless gallons of water, nasty chemicals and fuel that goes into manufacturing and transporting the toilet paper. We are finally replacing some of our original wipes with new wipes from cut up holey t-shirts and underwear and wash one to two extra small loads in hot water with biodegradable Bio-Kleen detergent, baking soda and vinegar per week. The equation looks pretty clear to me. Family wipes are win-win.

Here are a few important realizations that have come to me during during the past couple of years of family cloth use. The first is that it took a minor mental shift to be able to deal with our own biological waste. I think our society is so used to paying other people to deal with the dirty or gross things that we would rather not think about, that it does take a mental shift. Think about it. We pay people to separate the sludge of excrement and toilet paper and used condoms and other trash at the waste water treatment plant and we simply flush and don’t give it a second thought. We pay people to take our trash away so that we don’t have to think about it once we set it out at the curb. We pay people to clean and bury our dead so we don’t have to deal with the smell or the disgust of handling a dead body. We pay people to raise and slaughter our meat (usually in horrific conditions) so that we don’t have to see their (sometimes) degradation and death. All this delegating and not thinking that we do is leading is to not think about what we do and waste and destroy our most precious resources. If we don’t see and think about how to handle these situations, we take it all for granted and that makes it easier to waste paper, plastic, meat, etc. Of course, all of these thoughts are not only the result of using family cloth, but the result of a paradigm shift in which family cloth is only one component.

I’m really not trying to convince you all to make the switch, because I imagine that most people aren’t ready or inclined to switch from using toilet paper. What I am asking you to do is to not have the knee-jerk reaction that seems to come from hearing about family cloth: That family is bizarre/ultra-thrifty/hippy dippy/unsanitary. None of those are the truth. Family cloth is just as sanitary as using cloth diapers or cloth underwear. How many of you use disposable underwear? Don’t you trust your washer and dryer or clothesline to sanitize your underwear that inevitably has bacteria on it (no matter how well you wipe)? The same is true of family cloth. My method of baking soda, detergent, hot water and vinegar sanitize them very well.

Think about what changes could be effected if we all takes steps that are easy for us to change. Maybe family cloth is easy for me and not so easy for you, but perhaps you have changed something else that is easy for you and hard for me, like permanently decreasing driving or giving up a Frappaccino habit. It’s incremental, permanent lifestyle changes that are the key, folks.

If you are curious about the practical details of using family cloth, read on.

That’s my basket of clean wipes, within easy reach of the toilet. We use clean wipes for each job. Not one wipe that the whole family uses for the day. (It seems like that may be a misconception that some have.) When somebody has finished their business, they toss it into a lidded trash can reserved for soiled cloths. When it is full or we are running low on wipes, the cans from both bathrooms are hauled to the laundry area and rinsed in cold water with baking soda and then washed with hot water and a vinegar rinse and most recently, hung on our basement clothesline to dry though I used to dry them in my electric dryer.

Of course some families have variations in their routine. Some use a different color for the wipes for each family member so they don’t have to use wipes that other people have used. Some people toss wipes in with their cloth diaper loads (which I used to do).