The Top Five Countries by Per Capita Spending on Paper Towels

Average U.S. dollars spent on paper towels in 2017, per resident

data: euromonitor international

While Euromonitor doesn’t have data on exactly how many paper towels Americans go through each year, Svetlana Uduslivaia, the company’s head of research, did tell me that Americans lead the world in the usage of “tissue products,” the umbrella category that covers paper towels.

In explaining the U.S.’s enormous appetite for paper towels, Uduslivaia pointed to America’s relatively wealthy and large population. “A strong economy can support more spending on nonessentials like paper towels and purchases of higher-quality products,” she told me.

But given that other comparably wealthy countries don’t consume nearly as much on a per capita basis, the appeal must go beyond just what people can afford. When I asked Laurie Jennings, the director of the Good Housekeeping Institute, the consumer-testing arm of the Hearst-owned media brand, what she thought of paper towels, she praised them and said they were a standby in her own home. “They are convenient, they are absorbent, they are especially helpful in cleaning messes where something like cross-contamination could be an issue,” she says.

Perhaps the paper towel satisfies some deeper, uniquely American desire to be immediately rid of a problem, whatever the cost. “I definitely think they in many ways represent how Americans think in that people are obsessed with instant gratification,” Jennings told me.

The rest of the world gets by just fine without paper towels. In 2016, Nielsen, another market-research firm, released a report that looked at household-cleaning regimens in more than 60 countries, and it found that the most commonly used tools were brooms, mops, and rags. “Cleaning tools of the trade are as diverse as the regions themselves,” the report concluded, noting the popularity of scrubbing brushes in Latin America, cloth towels in the Middle East, and sponges in Europe.

The report also captures the hold paper towels have on the American household. Observe how much of an outlier North Americans are when Nielsen asked if they use paper towels “regularly,” compared with people from other regions (and consider that no other North American country appeared in Euromonitor’s top five paper-towel-consuming countries):

Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Use Paper Towels “Regularly,” by Region

nielsen

Nielsen suggests there’s a financial story behind these numbers. “Homes with lower relative incomes show greater reliance on reusable tools such as rags and cloths,” the report reads. “Meanwhile, homes with higher relative incomes rely more heavily on disposable options like paper towels.” Basically, Americans use so many paper towels because they can afford to.