Reusable kitchen products have always interested me, ever since the days when my father saved paper napkins to reuse at his next meal. I prefer cloth napkins to paper, and dishtowels to paper towels. Now here are two new products to add to my arsenal in the fight against waste: Skoy multi-use cleaning cloth and scrubber. I bought them from Amazon this week.

Both these products are made from natural materials: the cloth from cotton and wood pulp and the scrubber from cotton and a nontoxic hardener. Both can be washed in the dishwasher, which means they will be more sanitary than the dish rags that I throw in the washing machine. The cloth can also be microwaved to kill germs. And when it finally wears out, I can compost it. (The packaging for the scrubber makes no mention of composting.) [Note from June 2015: I took the cloth to Eco-Cycle’s Center for Hard to Recycle Materials in Boulder, Colorado, and the staff there said the cloth could not be composted because it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of foam. Natural foam, but still foam. Only products that are certified compostable can actually be composted with food scraps.]

The fact that Skoy products are colorful doesn’t hurt.

I also bought a similar product at King Soopers: Smart quilted reusable kitchen cloth. It’s made from viscose and can only be washed by hand or in the washing machine. So it’s a bit more delicate than the Skoy products but has the advantage of being more available.

Both towels are made in Germany, and the scrubber is made in Poland.

I spent about $15 on all three products, and if they do last as long as the marketing claims, then buying these products instead of paper towels and other scrubbers would save money.