Eco friendly laundry
What’s that? These new jargons keep on coming right? But this one is fairly straight forward. When you reduce your electricity consumption & switch to a plant-based laundry detergent, you win the prize for “Green laundry”.
Rather than pushing a new product at you, I want to talk about changing habits & perspectives.
2 Habit Changes for Eco Friendly Laundry
You always don't need the latest product or the gadget to lessen your eco footprint. Most of the time, it's a simple change in behaviour.
1. Wash Less
This can be done in 2 ways:
- Don't wash your clothes too frequently and wash it only when it's really dirty.
- Reduce the the number of times you wash your clothes and make sure you wash only when you have a full load.
2. Turn off Tumble Drying
Switch off that tumble dryer and use your clothes line or a drying rack to dry your clothes. It doesn't matter if the sun is shining or not, as a cold & crisp day or a windy day will work too. If it's raining or too damp outside, move the clothes to an drying rack inside.
5 Reasons Why Eco Friendly Laundry is Good
Here are 5 reasons why we should green our laundry.
1. Save Money & Energy
It saves a lot of electricity. Research has shown that a highly efficient tumble dryer will cost 4.5 kwh per cycle. Based on average electricity costs in the uk, if you run your tumble dryer 3 times a week, it will cost around £70 a year to run.
2. Dryer Damages Clothes
Studies show that tumble drying can cause significant damage to clothing, mainly in regards to wearing fabric down. The main reason this happens is because of the constant tossing inside the drum. A study on how dryers impact these tears found that after only twenty cycles of washing and drying, fabric lost approximately 50% of its tensile strength, making it twice as easy to tear.
3. Dryer Shrinks Clothes
Tumble drying shrinks clothes twice as much as air drying. This is because of the mechanical agitation and forced air. The forced air from the dryer causes the fibres of the fabric to constrict, causing shrinkage.
4. Emits Green House Gasses
Washing and drying a load every two days creates around 440kg of green house gas emissions each year, which is equivalent to flying from london to glasgow and back with 15-mile taxi rides to and from the airports. According to the guardian, it takes .7 kg of per wash when washed at 40 degrees and dried on the line. But this emission is almost 3.5 times more when tumble dried. That's a massive amount of emissions for just 1 cycle of drying.
5. Sun-Dried Clothes Kills Bacteria
Sunlight is naturally antibacterial. UV light kills bacteria on clothes. The clothes also smell fresh and the sun will make your whites whiter. The sun is also great at bleaching out stains and spots without the need for harsh chemicals.
Here's an old nursery rhyme that was sung possibly when they hung the clothes out to dry!
Over at isifiso.
All the products that I make at isifiso all come with wash instructions of "Wash at 30 degrees and hang dry" for this specific reason. There's no reason to tumble dry any of this.
