Can You Compost Paper Towels

Yes, you can compost a used paper towel if the only thing on it is food or water. Keep it out if it wiped up grease or oil, touched a cleaning product, or dealt with pet or human waste. Those towels go in the trash.

The question comes up if you are moving off paper towels gradually and still have a roll on the counter. Each towel lands in either the compost bin or the garbage, and one quick check at the moment you throw it away decides which. Guessing wrong in one direction wastes a towel's worth of compost material. Guessing wrong in the other can slow down a backyard pile or contaminate a curbside organics load.

A paper towel is wood pulp: cellulose and lignin from trees, pressed with water into a sheet. The microbes and fungi in a compost pile break down plant fiber, so they break down a plain paper towel the same way they break down a dry leaf.

In compost terms that makes it a "brown," a carbon-rich material. The EPA's home composting guidance asks for roughly two to three times more browns than greens (food scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings) by volume. Most kitchen bins run heavy on greens, and a damp paper towel with a smear of banana on it carries a little of both.

One limit on the evidence: that EPA page does not name paper towels in its list of browns. It approves shredded plain, uncolored paper, which is the closest match. The composter makers and municipal programs below are the ones that list paper towels by name.

The contaminant, not the towel, is what decides the outcome:

• Grease, oil, butter or meat residue. These foster anaerobic bacteria and odor, and several guides say they slow composting or stop it outright. The EPA already tells home composters to keep oils, meat and dairy out, and a towel soaked in them is the same material with paper attached.
• Cleaning products, bleach and disinfectants. These can harm the bacteria that do the decomposing.
• Pet waste, human waste and illness-related fluids. These are left out because of pathogen concerns.

The simplest rule comes from The Roundup: if whatever you wiped up could have gone in the compost on its own, the towel can too.

Tear towels into halves or quarters before adding them. Torn and single-ply towels break down faster than whole, thick multi-ply sheets. Estimates for how long a clean towel takes in a home bin run from 2 to 45 days in one guide and a few weeks to a month in another, depending mostly on moisture and on whether grease is present.

A backyard pile. Mix torn food-soiled towels in with your other browns and bury food scraps under 4 to 8 inches of dry material, per the EPA, to keep odor and pests down. Keep the pile about as damp as a wrung-out sponge. If you are setting up a pile for the first time, you can start composting for free with a bin you already own; our free composting guide covers that.

A curbside green bin. Some cities accept paper towels in the organics cart. The City of Burlingame, California tells residents that tissues, paper napkins and paper towels all go in the green compost bin. Commercial facilities also handle a wider range of material than a backyard pile, because they run hotter. That is one city's rule, though, and not a national one. Check your own hauler's list before you assume a greasy towel is welcome.

An electric composter. The machines take paper towels, but in small, prepared amounts:

• Reencle calls paper towels a useful carbon input, asks you to tear them into halves or quarters so they don't ball up in the mixing chamber, and says towels used with bleach or chemical cleaners should be thrown out.
• FoodCycler says paper towels and tissue must be cut up before they go in the Eco 5.
• Lomi, according to a review on Home for the Harvest, accepts soiled kitchen paper in limited amounts. Past about four napkins' worth per load, the output turns fluffy and stops looking like compost.

If you own one of these, the same food-or-water rule applies, with a quantity cap on top. Our page on what goes in an electric composter has the full loading limits.

Paper towels are compostable. They are not recyclable, even when clean. Burlingame's FAQ puts it plainly: "The fibers in the paper towels are too small to be recycled." Paper fiber can only go through recycling about 5 to 7 times before it gets too short to reuse, and paper towels are usually made from fiber near the end of that run.

Bleached versus unbleached is a smaller question than it looks. Bleached towels are still compostable. Reel Paper, which sells unbleached bamboo towels, recommends unbleached ones because chlorine bleaching can leave trace dioxin residues. That is a reasonable preference, but it comes from a company with a product to sell, and none of the sources here say a bleached towel ruins a pile. Printed or dyed towels are a different case: several guides advise keeping colored paper out.

The sources also don't cover towels blended with synthetic fibers. If a "paper" towel feels like fabric or isn't plainly paper, leave it out.

Ask one question at the bin: what did this towel touch?

• Water, fruit, vegetables or coffee. Compost it, torn into pieces.
• Bacon grease, cooking oil or butter. Trash it.
• Spray cleaner, bleach or disinfectant. Trash it.
• Pet messes or anything from a sick household member. Trash it.

If you use curbside compost, check your city's accepted list once, since programs differ. If you use an electric composter, cut the towels up and keep the count low.

The cleaner fix is to stop making the decision at all. A reusable cloth handles the greasy and chemical jobs that a compostable paper towel can't, and it goes in the wash instead of the trash. The switch works best if you do it one job at a time: move your spray-cleaner wipes and skillet wipe-downs to cloth first, since those are the towels that can't be composted anyway.