An interesting initiative “The Paperless Project” did some research how bad the usage of paper towels for the environment is. Their statistics say:

• To make one ton of paper towels 17 trees and 20,000 gallons of water are polluted.
• In the U.S. we currently use more than 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year and that number is growing steadily. This equals more than 3,000 tons of paper towel waste in the U.S. alone.
• Globally, discarded paper towels result in 254 million tons of trash every year.
• As many as 51,000 trees per day are required to replace the number of paper towels that are discarded every day.
• If every household in the U.S. used just one less 70-sheet roll of paper towels, that would save 544,000 trees each year.
• If every household in the U.S. used three less rolls per year, it would save 120,000 tons of waste and $4.1 million in landfill dumping fees.