Earth Care Corner: Green Tips By Joanne Westin

The average household does almost 400 loads of laundry, consuming about 13,500 gallons of (often heated) water. Your dryer is a major energy hog, second only to your refrigerator in energy use. It’s pretty obvious that if you wash clothes in cold water, wash less often, and hang them outside to dry, you will use less energy. Personally I am not about to give up using my dryer, but I don’t have a problem wearing many of my clothes more than once, and washing them in “warm” or “cool” water instead of hot. Here are some other tips – number 6 is most interesting. 1) Use “green” – that is without phosphates (that can cause algal blooms), made from plant materials (as opposed to petroleum products). can be replaced with a cup of white vinegar added to the washer during the rinse cycle. 2) Choose concentrated detergent to minimize packaging and the carbon footprint of shipping. 3) If you are buying new appliances look for the Energy Star logo. Adjust the load size to match what you are washing to minimize water use (and the energy to heat it if not using cold water) – even very basic machines now tend to have a setting that senses how much water is appropriate. 4) If, like me, you are not about to hang all your laundry outside, minimize the energy use of your dryer by keeping the lint filter clean. If your dryer has a moisture sensor, use it, and maybe wash light things and heavy things separately, since heavy things like towels take longer to dry. Since many dryer sheets have chemicals that aren’t environmentally friendly, use “green” ones or try a wool “dryer ball.” 5) Here’s one I can definitely get behind – don’t iron clothes. It shortens their lifetime. 6) Limit , and if you do get things dry cleaned use a company that avoids using perchloroethylene which has been linked to certain kinds of cancer. 7) Last but not least, here is one I was not aware of: Apparently, clothes made of synthetics release plastic microfibers into the water, and these evade sewage treatment and end up entering the bodies of fish, etc. Over 1 million tons are released from our washing machines every year. In terms of plastic fiber volume, a city the size of Berlin may be responsible for releasing the equivalent of 540,000 plastic bags’ worth of them into the ocean daily. You can minimize the fibers your laundry releases by choosing cotton for clothes you wash frequently, and washing synthetics in a special mesh bag made from microfilter material that is claimed to capture 99% of the microfibers released from the clothes. You can also buy a filter for your washer that filters out most of the microfibers.