Doing laundry is one of my favourite chores, if you can say that. It doesn’t take too much effort, and I enjoy sorting the clean clothes and feeling the lingering warmth if they’re fresh from the dryer. I like to listen to music as I put the clothes away (normally Bach’s Fugue in G minor or Chopin’s Prelude in E minor).
I tend to do the laundry on autopilot—I throw the whites in with the colours and don’t check the settings on the machine or the washing instructions.
But we know that doing laundry is intensive on both energy and water, and that the way that we wash our clothes affects how long they last. So here are some sustainable laundry tips that we can all follow.
The environmental impact of doing laundry
No matter how you look at it, doing the laundry has a hefty footprint. Approximately 5 to 10% of household energy use goes towards doing laundry. The biggest consumers of energy are heating the water and running the dryer.
In the United States, laundry is responsible for about 8% of household greenhouse gas emissions. When it comes to water use, each load uses 14 to 57 gallons of water, which adds up to about 19 billion cubic metres of water used annually.
Washing clothes also causes them to shed tiny fibres called microfibres. Every time we do the laundry, an average of 9 million microfibres are released, eventually ending up in the environment, including in our oceans.
The chemicals in products like laundry detergent and fabric softener can be harmful for human health. And the plastic packaging for detergent adds to our waste problem: about one billion laundry jugs are thrown away in the United States annually.
Sustainable laundry tips
There are some easy changes you can make to your laundry habits and the products you use to make the process better for the planet and you. Let’s dig in!
Consider your washer and dryer
If you have the means, consider investing in an Energy Star-certified washer and dryer to save on energy use. Front-loading washing machines also tend to use less water and energy and have a larger capacity.
In any case, make sure to keep on top of washer and dryer maintenance so the machines can run as efficiently as possible. This includes emptying the lint trap regularly.
Wash your clothes less often
Apart from socks and underwear, most clothes don’t need to be washed as often as you think. Unless an item is stinky or stained, you can probably wear it at least a couple times before washing. Check out these guidelines from ZeroWasteStore about how often to wash different kinds of clothes.
Washing clothes less often helps save energy and water. Plus, it reduces the colour fading, shrinking and microfibre shedding that can come from overwashing.
Only run full loads of laundry
In general, try to only run the washer and dryer when they’re full (considered to be three-quarters full). I normally wait until the last possible day to do laundry, which may look like procrastination, but I tell myself is being efficient!
One hack for this: buy more socks and underwear. At least for me, those are often the items of clothing that I run out of first, so having more means I can do laundry less often.
The benefit of waiting until you have a full load is that you don’t waste energy and water on a load with only a few items.
However, if you need to do laundry earlier, your washer may have a setting for smaller load sizes that uses less water.
Consider your detergent
Detergent—it’s a key component in the laundry process, but both the ingredients and packaging can cause environmental problems.
When it comes to ingredients, look for detergents that are natural and non-toxic. However, be wary of greenwashing since products that are presented as better for you may still contain chemicals. The U.S Environmental Protection Agency’s Safer Choice label is one way to know that products are safer for human health and the environment. Alternatively, you could try making your own detergent.
The jury’s still out on whether liquid or powder detergent is better for the planet, but it’s worth considering what kind of packaging the detergent comes in and whether that’s reusable/recyclable. If you buy liquid detergent in a jug, you can get more use out of the jug by refilling it at a zero waste store.
There are a few detergent alternatives that are marketed as being more eco-friendly, including paper laundry detergent strips, laundry paste concentrate and laundry detergent tablets that come wrapped in paper.
Wash your clothes in cold(er) water
Heating the water makes up a big portion of a washing machine’s energy use—as much as 90%. Switching to using cold water is an easy change to make, and cooler washes are just as effective in most cases. Be sure to check the label on your clothes in case there’s an item that absolutely must be washed in hot water. Plus, check these tips from ZeroWasteStore about when to wash in cool versus warm water.
Besides saving energy, washing in cold water helps extend the life of your clothes by preventing shrinking and colour bleeding.
Air dry your clothes
The dryer is another big energy suck. According to some estimates, machine drying clothes accounts for 75% of laundry’s total carbon footprint. The good news is that air drying your clothes uses zero energy!
This may look like hanging clothes outside on a clothesline or indoors on a drying rack. Outdoors has the benefit of the sunshine and fresh air, while indoors allows for flexibility if the weather is not good or you happened to do laundry at 10 p.m.
Of course, life happens and the dryer is often more convenient. It’s okay to take a hybrid approach and use the dryer sometimes and air dry other times.
Use wool dryer balls
If you are using the dryer, wool dryer balls are a way to feed multiple birds with one hand. These balls can be used many times and replace both fabric softener and dryer sheets, which are both typically laden with chemicals.
Wool dryer balls reduce static and wrinkles, soften fabric and even cut down on your drying time.
Cleaning up your laundry routine
Laundry is one of those chores that you can’t avoid. It’s so commonplace that you may not even consider the environmental impact. Yet doing the laundry is heavy on energy and water use, and contributes to chemical and plastic pollution.
Try some of these sustainable laundry tips to clean up your laundry routine and achieve a clean that you can feel good about.
I want to know: How do you clean up your laundry routine?
Categories and tags:
Share this post:
If your washer has a timer, set it to run in the middle of the night. This is environmentally better since the hydro system has excess capacity at night. If your hydro plan has differentiated rates depending on time-of-use, you save money too.
Other idea: if your life situation allows it, simply do not have a dryer. This eliminates the use of resources to manufacture and to distribute the dryer (and ultimately to dispose of it), saves massive amounts of electricity over the years, and makes your clothing last longer. Heated tumble drying is hard on clothes.
Thanks for the great tips! Running the washer overnight is an easy switch if your machine has a timer. And if you can manage without a dryer, that’s great.
I use the laundry strips that come in a cardboard envelope; they work ok. I use cold or lukewarm water, never hot, so I found the pods didn’t always dissolve well if the load was full.
Rarely use the dryer, am lucky to have an outdoors clothesline and a rack inside.
I’m glad to hear the laundry strips are working out for you! And that’s great that you use cold or lukewarm water to wash and rarely use the dryer.