>>107146625That's considerably less than the energy required to bus paper, pulp and wood around and turn it into varying grades of paper, including paper towels with the requisite absorbency.
It's a little more complicated chemically than just making tree soup; conversely you only bus the reusable towels as far as wherever your laundry facility is, which for larger orgs was often in the same building (even for orgs you wouldn't expect to have that - banks, for example). It doesn't make as much sense if you have to take them a long way, but since even smaller businesses could in theory pool between a single launderer in their midst, it's not like everything is going to the fucking moon and back.
Until the advent of cheap turbine hand dryers and low-cost renewable sources of energy, it absolutely was the definitive environmentally friendly way of doing it.
>but detergent is chemicals!so are you, and you know what's really shitty? All the fucking dirty idiots I've argued with about detergent levels and dishwashers and clothes washers and dry cleaning down the years, who honestly thought they were getting clean and not just redistributing dirt particles and grease with the amount of soap they used because they wanted to save the planet from itself. Protip: soap works by sticking to shit and sinking. If you filter that water in say a dishwasher, you can reuse it many times more in the same wash without losing the embedded heat energy, inside of a box which is insulated, for a fraction of the energy cost of getting your dishes the same clean in the sink. It's not 1956 and I don't want to eat off your greasy goddamned plates, fucker. Nor do I want to sit next to you at work in your rancid fucking clothes just because you want to save the earth. You know what produces shittons of CO2? Bacteria. You know what kills those pdq? Soap.
It's true that you can use too much detergent in any wash. It's also true that'll fuck your appliances long before it fucks your drain.
