A handkerchief is not to be sneezed at

After decades of being confined to the back of the linen cupboards, the humble handkerchief is making a comeback into popular favour.
Australians, living in a land of sweat, allergies and runny noses, are looking at the cost of tissues on the environment, and discovering some starting realities.
The Australian connection to handkerchiefs goes back more than 200 years.
Elizabeth Thackery, the first female convict to set foot in Australia in 1788, was deported from Britain after being found guilty of stealing five silk handkerchiefs.
Until recently, a handkerchief was an essential personal possession. As a child I was not allowed out of the house without a fresh cotton handkerchief.
As a young man I carried two handkerchiefs, thinking the spare might be useful for a damsel in distress. As a young father I was given a handkerchief or two as Christmas, birthday and father’s day presents.
The secret of a handkerchief is that it is made to be reused. A handkerchief is a product of bygone days, of thrift and products made to last. Tissues are a product of a marketing culture, of disposable, single use comsummables.
Now flimsy nonwoven tissues have almost made the use of handkerchiefs redundant.
I have one remaining handkerchief, ironed but seldom taken out on a journey.
Tissues are ubiquitous. I don’t have to walk far to find a fresh tissue or paper napkin I can ‘borrow’.
When I have a cold, my bed, office, car and bathroom are ankle deep with used scrumpled tissues.
But I believe that when I have a cold, a handkerchief is gentler on my nose, as cheap to replace as a boxes of tissues, and less likely to spread viruses.
The first tissue napkins were introduced in the 1920's. Now about 21 million tonnes of lightweight tissues are produced each year, used mostly in place of handkerchiefs. Each year Australians reportedly use 273 000 tonnes of tissue products, mostly imported from China.
Some people think the time has come to make an issue of tissues, advocating more frequent use of handkerchiefs , to help the environment.
Not having to wash yuckie used handkerchiefs on laundry day might be one argument in favour of tissues. But there are other considerations
Rebecca Blackburn from G magazine used data collected from a 1995 Duke University research on paper and from Cambridge University research into textiles in 2006, to make comparisons of environmental impacts, between a single use 1 g tissue versus a 15 g cotton hanky that could be reused (by washing) 520 times.
According to the research there are four main considerations in the hanky vs tissue debate: water used in making and maintaining the product, energy consummed in manufacture, waste after use and comparative costs between buying tissues or hankies..
Water
A lot of water is used to make each of these products. It takes around 2.2 Litres of water to produce one paper tissue. There is no real cost of maintenance.
It takes 165 Litres of water to grow cotton to manufacture a single hanky, and then it has to be washed after each use.. An additional 0.15 L of water is required each time the hanky is cleaned. But the hanky will be used at least 520 times, which means the agricultural water and the washing water comes to 0.47 L each time you take it from your pocket.
So the clean cotton hanky wins by more than a nose, using four and half times less water than a clean tissue.
Energy
It takes three times more energy to grow trees and produce pulp to manufacture a fresh fibre tissue compared to a producing a fresh cotton hanky.
To make a tissue takes 0.013 kWh. While it takes 0.78 kWh to produce a cotton hanky - spread over 520 uses this works out to be only 0.04 kWh per use, including washing and drying. Since laundering is the main source of energy use, just switching from tumble drying to line drying will reduce energy use even further, to 0.02 kWh.
Waste
Not surprisingly tissues create a fair amount of waste. Once a tissue has been used it can't be recycled, so it ends up in landfill. A single virgin fibre tissue creates about 1.3 g of waste, including waste from manufacturing. Manufacturers are reluctant to sell tissues made from recycled paper because they say they can't make them soft enough.
Surprisingly the greatest source of waste from cotton hankies is due to the coal mining waste created to make electricity needed for laundering. One cotton hankie produces 0.05 g of landfill-bound waste for each use, which is 26 times less waste than a tissue.