2. Old t-shirts and towels as cleaning cloths
Worn cotton is better at most cleaning jobs than anything you can buy, and households in the US, Canada and the UK throw away an enormous quantity of textiles a year, most of which is too worn to donate.
Sort what you have by fabric. Old cotton t-shirts, especially the thinner worn ones, are the best all-purpose cloth: lint-free once washed a few times, soft enough for glass and screens, and absorbent. Towelling is for spills and floors. Flannel and jersey suit dusting and polishing. Synthetic sportswear is close to useless for cleaning — it repels water rather than absorbing it — so that goes to a textile recycling point instead.
Cut into squares of roughly 12 by 12 inches, or 30 by 30 cm. Cut across the shirt below the sleeves for the biggest usable pieces, and cut with fabric scissors rather than tearing, though jersey does not fray so the edges need no finishing at all. One adult t-shirt gives four or five good cloths.
Store them in an open basket under the sink so grabbing one takes no more effort than pulling a paper towel, which is the entire point. A cloth kept in a cupboard in another room loses to kitchen roll every time.
Wash them on a hot cycle separately from clothes, with no fabric conditioner — conditioner coats the fibres and destroys absorbency, which is the most common reason homemade cloths get abandoned as useless.
Keep a separate colour or a marked pile for the worst jobs: oven, barbecue, car oil, paint. Those get used once and binned, and colour-coding stops them coming back into the kitchen rotation.