Our Story

ALT was born out a compelling idea to connect a growing need with an environment-friendly and limitless supply.

Co-founders Madhu and Partha were already making ethically-sourced linen & apparel under the socially conscious brand Bloom & Give when they met the third founder Eric, who had spent years working with restaurants. The chemistry was instantaneous and ideas started flowing!

We had three somewhat unrelated (or so we thought) pet peeves ...

• The excessive use of paper towels in America's homes. Our country consumes nearly 50% of the global production, and its growing every year!


• Polyester! Over 90% of restaurants still use this icky manmade monstrosity (aka plastic) in their linens that are neither good for us diners, nor for Mama Earth.


• An average restaurant uses about 1,000 rags, and 1,000 cleaning towels weekly, and their commercial linen suppliers can't afford to offer higher priced recycled options.

We soon launched ALT and started replacing polyester restaurant linens with cotton. And since restaurants don't actually buy linens but need to have them serviced (laundered), we built a high-efficiency commercial laundry facility. Within the first few months of washing hundreds of tons of restaurant linens, made from virgin cotton, we were sick to our stomachs. Our restaurant customers would have gladly opted for recycled (or better yet, upcycled) towels but they simply couldn't afford them.

During the pandemic shutdown, when stores ran out of paper towels, many of our friends were forced to switch completely over to cotton kitchen towels and we soon realized the main deterrent to households wanting to get off paper towels was the life of a cotton kitchen towel. This was our Eureka moment. What if we could give home kitchens that extra incentive to ditch paper, and at the same time, crowd-source their worn linen for the hospitality industry.

Jump in! Take the #PaperTowelChallenge.