The soft, spill-saving history of kitchen roll
When it comes to those everyday spills there’s a humble perforated hero that’s going one hundred years strong. In the UK, we call them kitchen rolls, in the rest of the world, they’re paper towels, and wherever you are they’re a quick, disposable solution to messes
We talk about eco-friendly toilet paper all the time on this blog, so we thought we’d take a moment to take a look at some of the history and facts surrounding its bigger-sheeted, more durable, cousin.
We’ll start with a question that customers ask from time to time, what’s the difference between toilet paper and kitchen roll?
Are kitchen rolls just big toilet rolls?
Kitchen roll might look and feel like a toilet roll with larger sheets, but the two kinds of tissue are made differently, and knowing the difference might save you some nasty plumbing problems.
Toilet rolls are designed with two main factors in mind; they need to be soft and strong when you use them, and they need to rapidly break down when they’re flushed. At Naked Sprout our factory tests the wet and dry strength of every batch of toilet paper they make, so that they can be sure they’re breaking down like standard products.
Kitchen rolls, on the other hand, are specifically designed to not break down. They’re the same soft, absorbent tissue, but impregnated with a food-safe resin-based substance that improves their wet strength. This means that they can mop up spills without turning into a pulpy mess. It also means that kitchen rolls should never be flushed down the toilet. No, not even if you’ve completely run out of toilet paper!
The origins of kitchen rolls
So that’s what they are, where did they come from?
The story of paper towels begins in the 1920s. Like the covid-era of the early 2020s, the early 1920s was shaped by a global health crisis, as the world recovered from the devastating Spanish flu. Governments, public health organisations, and ordinary people became more widely aware of the critical importance of personal hygiene, particularly proper hand washing and drying.
In 1922, the Nibroc Paper Company in the US under inventor (and mayor!) William E Corbin launched the first disposable paper towel, intended as a more hygienic replacement for shared hand towels in public bathrooms. Nine years later the Scott Paper Company, known for developing the first soft tissue toilet roll, introduced their own version. Both companies pitched their products with a simple but revolutionary idea: single-use, absorbent sheets that could be thrown away after use, cleaner and more convenient than fabric towels.
Which countries use kitchen roll?
While their initial use focused on hand drying, kitchen rolls quickly found a place in homes as versatile cleaning tools. Today, they are used for everything from cleaning mirrors to wiping up cooking fat that would otherwise go down the drain. They’re the second most popular product at Naked Sprout, behind our unbleached bamboo toilet rolls, and they’re the second most popular tissue product worldwide.
And while we’re talking worldwide, kitchen roll actually has a global appeal that toilet roll can’t claim. People in many countries, including much of Asia and the Middle East, use water instead of tissue for cleansing after using the toilet, so you’re unlikely to find toilet rolls in shops, homes, or public toilets. But you might still find kitchen rolls, which are increasingly popular even in toilet-paper free countries.
Which country uses the most kitchen roll?
With much of the world firmly team kitchen roll, who uses the most sheets? Like the Olympics, America generally takes the lead. In the United States, paper towels are considered so essential that it’s common to find dispensers built into home kitchens. The average American household uses around 24 kilograms of paper towels per year, about 50% higher than the figure in Europe.
Why are we lower on this side of the pond? Europeans tend to adopt a more mixed approach to cleaning messes, with sponges and cloths typically used for actual cleaning, and paper towels for mopping up waste and spills, and for drying.
We think this is a good balance, especially because kitchen rolls aren’t exactly neutral in their environmental impact…
Are kitchen rolls bad for the environment?
Kitchen rolls are an everyday, disposable item that are designed for a single use so it’s really important to be aware of their environmental footprint.
Traditional paper towels are often made from virgin tree pulp, a process that involves cutting down trees, using large amounts of water to turn the raw timber into pulp, and huge amounts of fossil fuels to dry the pulp into soft sheets. Most kitchen rolls are also bleached and treated with chemicals to achieve a bright white appearance, and on top of this they often come packaged in plastic wrapping.
Recycled paper towels offer a greener choice, as they are made from post-consumer paper waste and help reduce the demand for fresh tree pulp. However, not all recycled paper towels are created equal. Some still undergo bleaching processes and come wrapped in plastic, which limits their overall eco-friendliness, and there’s still the issue of the fossil fuels used to dry them.
That’s why we’ve taken extra care to make kitchen rolls you can be proud of. Naked Sprout kitchen rolls are made from fast-growing bamboo, unbleached, and always good to recycle. They’re unwrapped because we didn't want to use extra resources and dyes to get them to you, and they’re brown because that's the colour of the unbleached raw materials! And beyond all this, our ground-breaking tissue mill in Spain only uses renewable energy to dry our sheets, so you’re not indirectly using fossil fuels to dry your kitchen counters!
Everyday spills shouldn’t cost the earth
Next time your friends and family notice your brown kitchen rolls, you can tell them the whole story.
It’s been one hundred years of thrills, spills, and tissue mills (okay, maybe not thrills). From once in a century pandemics to everyday mopping, kitchen rolls stand ready to roll into action on shelves and counter tops world wide. It’s a story we’re proud to step into with our unbleached, low carbon, zero plastic kitchen rolls. Clean homes and hands don’t have to come at the cost of a clean environment.
Want kitchen rolls made to clean sustainably?