It’s a plane, and I really might spill my drink, but what good would a cocktail napkin be? Cocktail napkins were designed to handle rings of condensation, but are wholly ineffective in spill scenarios. It’s like tossing a sponge into a pond. Yet millions are given out and thrown away every day, and in aggregate their effect on the world isn’t inconsequential.

“It’s really just how we’ve always done it,” said Ivan Noel, the president of a cabin-crew training organization called the In-Flight Institute, which staffs airlines around the world. “It’s probably a holdback from the past. I haven’t put a great deal of thought into it.”

It’s not clear to me anyone has.

“They’re light, they’re inexpensive, and they can also be used as marketing,” he continued, explaining to me that during training, flight attendants are told the logo on the cocktail napkin goes up and toward the passenger. Some low-cost carriers have begun printing actual advertisements on the napkins.

“It does have a utilitarian use, as well,” he said. “Particularly if you’re on a bumpier flight and you’re stuck in your seat, and if you don’t have a napkin on you, I would suggest that it would be uncomfortable to have fluid on your table tray.”

That’s when I would ring the call button and say there is fluid on my tray and ask for a napkin.

“That’s a very good point as well,” he said. “However, let’s say that you just have condensation.”

Commercial airplanes have plastic tray tables, which aren’t damaged by water rings. [Editor’s note: What about damage to a magazine you put on the table? JH: How much condensation do you get in airplanes? I feel like the climate control keeps it minimal. Ed.: Just looking out for magazines.] It takes concerted effort to damage a tray table, in my experience.

“Well let’s say you have a ring on your table tray, which now you’re going to put away, and it’s going to get the inside of the seat back wet,” Noel said. “That could be another way to look at it.”

The other argument in favor of the cocktail napkin is that it prevents the drink from sliding across the tray table. That’s true—assuming you don’t have one of those tray tables with a recessed well that’s made to sort of secure a cup. Like the idea of cupholders on planes is so impossible. But that’s a screed for another time.

If the idea is that the napkin prevents the cup from sliding, the scenario in which the napkin actually prevents a spill is a very rare one. The force of turbulence or a bumped tray would have to be great enough to overcome the friction of the cup-tray interface, but not great enough to overcome the cup-napkin-tray interface.

I don’t know what made me start getting anxious about wasted airplane napkins, but once I started thinking about them, they became really important. Every day, 2,587,000 people fly in and out of U.S. airports alone. I started seeing people as napkins.