Organizing plastic bags and cloth towels

I've been going through our kitchen inch by inch since our recession remodel wrapped up (pictures soon!). I'm trying to make it more efficient by getting rid of lots of excess stuff and reorganizing cabinets and drawers. There's no sense spending all that time and money to make it outwardly pleasing when chaos reigns inside the cabinets! Recently I tackled a drawer that stores our plastic bags, foil, waxed paper, towels and oven mits. I didn't have the foresight to take a 'before' photo, but trust me -- it was a disaster. Plastic bags that I'd washed for reuse were just shoved in randomly. We had all of these pot holders in there, which we never, ever use. And the towels were always getting tossed around. After a big purge and an aha! moment, now it looks like this:

My aha! moment was realizing that I should be storing my reused plastic baggies in the same box from which they originated! For some reason I always felt I needed to keep the reused bags separate from the pristine, new baggies. Now I just shove them back into the boxes, and that way they are the first bags I grab when I need one. It also keeps the gallon size separate from the pint size separate from the sandwich baggie size. Then I have another box for random veggie bags from the grocery store. So much better.

Other plastic bags for recycling or potential reuse get shoved into this mesh tube that hangs in our garage right outside the kitchen door. The Container Store no longer carries this, but IKEA has something similar. As you can see, I continue to struggle with plastic.

My towels are divided into two piles: grimy and good. The grimy ones are used in place of paper towels to clean up messes. (Can it be possible that we stopped buying paper towels two years ago? Yes.) Those baby washcloths, which are now 7.5 years old (wah, my babies!), are used for cleaning up smaller messes. The good towels are used to dry clean items: dishes, hands, countertops. When a towel gets dirty, I toss it into a basket along with our soiled cloth napkins. I used to toss all of these items on the kitchen floor where they would sit in a growing pile for a few days (nice) but the remodel opened up a little spot for a basket. 

Since I typically do laundry every 7-10 days, these cloth towels get tossed right in with clothes. And since I only wash full loads of laundry, these napkins and towels have not increased the number of times I run the washer and dryer (and bonus points for line drying).

Organized reuse = happy EnviroMom in the kitchen, despite her often sub-par meal offerings.