Kitchen Towel Roll

Details

A two-ply kitchen towel that holds together when wet, which is the only test that matters, because a weak sheet means you pull three and the cheaper roll ends up costing more. So the specification is written out rather than summarised. Grammage 21 GSM per ply and 42 GSM for the finished two-ply sheet, measured to ISO 12625-6. Wet tensile strength 165 newtons per metre in the machine direction after a five second soak, measured to ISO 12625-5, which is about forty percent of its dry tensile. That wet strength does not happen by itself and here is the part nobody prints: it comes from a wet-strength resin, polyamide-epichlorohydrin, and we name it because the same resin is what makes a kitchen towel slow to break down. A towel with wet strength does not belong in a compost pit and it certainly does not belong down a toilet. Nothing that says flushable in this aisle is flushable, and a kitchen towel does not even claim to be. On bleaching we are going to be precise rather than flattering. This pulp is elemental chlorine free, bleached with chlorine dioxide, with residual AOX under 0.2 kg per tonne of pulp. Elemental chlorine free is not the same thing as chlorine free, and rounding it up to chlorine free on a pack would be the exact cheat this shelf exists to refuse. Totally chlorine free pulp, bleached with oxygen and peroxide alone, does exist and we do not use it, because TCF pulp is weaker and a kitchen towel that shreds when wet is a worse product for the person buying it.

• Pulp is 100 percent virgin: about 70 percent short-fibre eucalyptus for bulk and absorbency, 30 percent long-fibre softwood for wet strength
• No recycled fibre, and the reason is specific rather than snobbery. Recovered paper carries mineral oil residues from printing ink, the MOSH and MOAH fractions, and a kitchen towel goes on food
• No fragrance, no printed dye pattern, no lotion coating
• Perforated at the half sheet as well as the full sheet, so you tear what the job needs. Sheet 22 cm by 24 cm, 60 full sheets per roll
• One damp sheet wipes a full counter without pilling apart, which is what the 165 N/m figure buys you
• Uncoated card core, which composts, and a recyclable outer wrap with no foil laminate
• Use it where a cloth genuinely will not do: draining a fried snack, wiping raw chicken juice, mopping a spill before somebody slips. For everything else the cellulose sponge cloths in this range do the job and do not go in a bin
• The arithmetic on that, since we would rather you bought fewer of these. At three sheets a day a 60-sheet roll lasts 20 days, so a year is about 18 rolls. One sponge cloth over its nine month life displaces roughly 14 of them
• Cost per sheet is Rs 1.24 at 2 rolls, Rs 1.16 at 4 and Rs 1.11 at 6