Day 11 - Dirty laundry

We lost power today for a few hours. I was right in the middle of doing a load of beach towels in the washer when it happened.

I started thinking about how many times I wash those beach towels over one summer. Lots of times they’re just wet, not dirty. But I have nowhere to hang them, so out of habit I stick them in the washing machine, and then the dryer, using loads of resources to basically dry a wet towel.

I bet I do at least four loads of towels a week in the summer in my front-loading washer, which uses about 20 gallons of water per load. (A top-loading washer uses between 40 and 50.) So if I hung the towels up to dry half the time, and only washed them half the time, I would save 40 gallons of water a week, just for towels.

Now imagine if we wore our clothes (not including underwear, of course!) twice instead of once before tossing them into the laundry basket. That’s saving another four loads a week, or another 80 gallons! That’s 120 gallons of water per week by just wearing clothes or using towels twice before laundering. Amazing!

That doesn’t even take into consideration the detergent it takes to wash them, or the electricity I burn to heat the water and dry them. We’ll save those numbers for another day…

Tip for Day Eleven – Conserve water and energy by wearing clothes more than once if they aren’t dirty.