INTERNATIONAL REPORT—The most sustainable towel in a hotel is the one you do not have to replace next year. That sounds obvious. It is rarely how towels get chosen.
I run Casa da Toalha, a Brazilian online retailer of towels and bed, table and bath linens. We have sold online since 2009, from Brusque, one of Brazil’s textile regions. In August we published our first annual study of the Brazilian towel market, built on 21,546 real orders placed between 1 January 1 and July 31, 2026. The data is open under a CC BY 4.0 license.
I want to be clear about what our data is. We measure how people buy. We do not measure water, energy or detergent, so you will not find a consumption figure from me here. Where I describe how a towel behaves in a laundry, that comes from seventeen years of selling them and from what our mills tell us, not from a controlled test. I have kept the two apart on purpose.
Replacement is the part of a towel’s footprint a purchasing team really controls. You do not control how long a guest showers. You share control of how the laundry runs. You fully control what you sign for, and how many cycles it survives before it becomes a rag.
What the Buyer is Already Asking
Two findings from our study point straight at this. The first is what people worry about. In a survey at checkout with 502 respondents, 22.3 percent said their main doubt before buying was whether the quality and the softness would hold up. Only 2.2 per cent said their doubt was the price. Price is not what stops the sale. Doubt about durability is.
The second is how people buy. In our bath category, 89.7 percent of revenue comes from kits and five-piece sets. Individual towels are 9.7 percent. Brazilians renew a whole bathroom at once rather than replacing one worn towel at a time. That habit has a cost. When a set ages together it also leaves together, and one weak item pulls the whole set out of service early.
There is a third signal I find more interesting than either. Google Search Console records more than 20,000 impressions a year on our pages for searches containing gramatura, the Portuguese word for the weight of a fabric per square meter. Ordinary shoppers, not purchasing managers, are typing a technical specification into a search box. The vocabulary of the buying department has reached the consumer.
Which brings me to the problem.
What Grammage Does Not Tell You
Grammage, or GSM, is grams per square meter. It is the number everyone quotes, on our site as much as anywhere else. It is useful. It is also the easiest number in this industry to hit without earning it.
Two towels can carry the same GSM on the label and behave very differently after fifty washes. Weight tells you how much material was there on the day it was measured. It does not tell you what the material is, or how it was put together.
What decides survival, in my experience selling them:
- The fiber. Longer staple cotton spins into a smoother, stronger yarn. Shorter fiber can reach the same weight and will shed and pill sooner.
- The yarn and the loop. Twist, loop height and loop density change how a towel absorbs and how it holds its shape. A tall, loose loop feels generous in the showroom and flattens quickly under industrial extraction.
- The finish. Softeners and sizing add weight and hand feel. Some of that washes out in the first cycles. The towel your guest touches in month six is the honest one.
- The edges. Hems and selvedges usually fail before the body does. It is the first place I would look at on a sample.
- Color and chemistry. Fastness against chlorine and high temperature decides whether a white stays white and a color stays a color, and that is what sends most towels out of rotation while they are still perfectly absorbent. None of that is printed on the label. All of it is answerable by the mill.What to Ask Before SigningIf I were buying for a property, these are the questions I would put in writing, and I would ask for the answers in writing too.
- What is the fiber, and what is the staple length? Ask for the origin, not just the word cotton.
- At what stage was the grammage measured, before or after finishing, and to which standard?
- What does the towel weigh after five industrial washes? This one answer does more work than the whole spec sheet.
- What is the absorbency after washing, not new, and by which test method?
- What is the color fastness to chlorine and to washing temperature, with the scale used.
How is the hem built, and what is the stitch density. - Can I have production samples rather than showroom samples, and can I run them through my own laundry for a month before the order?
- What is the guarantee on shade and weight if I reorder in twelve months, so a replacement set does not arrive visibly different and force you to retire stock that still works.
Not one of those questions asks for a discount. They ask the supplier to be specific. The mills that answer quickly are, in my experience, the mills whose towels last. The ones that answer with adjectives tell you something too.
In Conclusion
The greenest purchasing decision in linen is a boring one. Buy fewer, better specified towels, less often, and know exactly why they lasted. Our data says the shopper at home has already worked this out and is searching for the specification on their own. A hospitality buyer has far more leverage than that shopper and asking for more than a number on a label is the cheapest lever there is.
The study, with the data open under CC BY 4.0, is here: https://www.casadatoalha.com.br/pages/estudo-toalha-2026.
About the Author:
Ana Carolina Nielson is the founder of Casa da Toalha, a Brazilian online retailer of towels and bed, table and bath linens, based in Brusque, Santa Catarina.
