Know how I always say the greenest thing you can do is not buy anything? Well, I do. And when I’m feeling really grouchy, I’ll say things like “buying green sh*t doesn’t make you green.” Even though I know replacing the “i” in shit with an asterisk doesn’t make it pol*te.
Anyway, it turns out I may have been slightly less than a hundred percent correct.
How many pairs of underwear do you have? I don’t mean that in a creepy way. I only ask because one of the easier ways you can be greener with your wardrobe is to wash your clothes less often. But to do that, you’re going to need enough smalls to go the distance between laundry bouts.
The biggest environmental impact from your clothes comes from washing and drying, not manufacture or transportation. Do you know how much energy that washing machine uses? About 0.256 kWh per load, plus about 40 gallons of water. Most of the energy goes towards heating the water. So if you love those hot washes, think about going warm or cold a bit more often. The good news is that hot water shrinks and fades fabric, so your clothes will last longer if you lower the temp. The bad news is that hot water also gets things clean. To get around that, you can soak your dirtiest things in warm water before washing. Also, treat stains as soon as they happen. You might not even need to put the item in the washer at all.
Thought your washer was bad for your carbon footprint? It’s positively smug, sitting as it does next to one of the biggest energy hogs around, the dryer. One dryer cycle uses more than 10 times the energy of a wash, and it destroys your clothes so you’ll end up buying new ones sooner. Got a yard? Stick up a clothes line. No outside space? Get a clothes horse, leap on its back and ride it all the way to green heaven. Or just hang the stuff on your shower curtain rail. Yes, it’s unsightly, but so are dead polar bears.
Need I mention environmentally-friendly detergent? Some are better than others; nothing works quite like chlorine. Just console yourself with a well-earned feeling of smugness if the grey-ish tinge on your running socks gets you down. And keep pre-treating those stains!
The best part is that you get to do all of it less often, and you can use the time you would have spent on laundry for other, low-impact pursuits.
(Stinky guy who was sitting near me on the subway yesterday: none of this applies to you. Wash, wash, wash the stench away, using all the industrial chemicals in China if necessary.)