Life is hard, take it easy

A young couple’s discoveries while learning to decorate their first apartment, be frugal and green the process.

Green your whites

 

But not only your whites, all of your laundry. We found this article in Planet Green and we inmediately wanted to share it with you to prove how easy it can be to green those laundry days. Make sure you check their website since they give lots of info and tips on this. We just want to focus on the numbers they offer and compare them to our household:

GREEN LAUNDRY: BY THE NUMBERS

• 90 percent: Amount of total of energy used by a typical washing machine to heat the water; only 10 percent is used to power the motor.

• 34 million tons: Amount of carbon dioxide emissions that would be saved if every U.S. household used only cold water for washing clothes–that’s nearly 8 percent of the Kyoto target for the U.S.

• 700 pounds: Amount of carbon dioxide emissions saved each year by line-drying your family’s laundry. You’d save 75 bucks, too.

• 99 pounds: Amount of carbon dioxide emissions saved per household each year by running only full loads of laundry.

• 7,000 gallons: Amount of water saved per year by a typical front-loading washing machine compared to a top-loading washing machine.

• 88 percent: Average increase in energy efficiency for a washing machine between 1981 and 2003.

• 49: Percentage of laundry loads run with warm water in the U.S. 37 percent are run with cold water and 14 percent with hot.

 

And now, our facts:

• We always set our washing machine to “cold” except for rags, certain towels, etc. but we have enough of them as to only wash them every 6-8 weeks.

• We had the opportunity of getting a dryer (My grandparets were willing to buy it as a gift!) and we opted out. The energy saved, the impact (manufacturing, transport, etc) and the money we were able to spend on our dining table and chairs were well worth the effort of line drying everything. And yes, for us is a big effort since we live in an apartment without a balcony and are not allowed to install lines outside the windows. We put the clothes to dry inside the house or up at the roof.

• Even though we ONLY run full loads, we always feel there’s something else we could do.

• Front load and high efficiency washing machine at home! You can see our not-so-fancy-but-great-quality washing machine in our previuos post.

So, any tips to further green our laundry? For now, we’ve started using half the reccommended amount of detergent and have noticed nothing in how clean our clothes are. Maybe this won’t apply to families with toddlers, but for two not-so-stainy people, it works. In the future, we may try these Eco Balls.

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