Now that you have your drying rack, your clotheslines and your other essential equipment, you have the opportunity to take your environmentally-friendly laundry to the next level. You can try these techniques for reducing your environmental impact even more:

• Wear your clothes longer between washes – depending on your lifestyle you can probably increase the number of times you wear your jeans or shirts before they go into the laundry hamper
• Do some of your laundry by hand – this is an efficient way to take care of your more delicate pieces – it preserves their colour and prolongs their life
• Make sure that you wash full loads in cold water whenever you can – most detergents are now designed to do their job in cold water, so believe them!
• Go to an environmentally-friendly laundromat to do big loads rather than many small ones – obviously this has to make sense in terms of travel distance and your volume of laundry
• Use dryer wool balls to shrink your dryer time, reduce static and avoid the chemicals found in dryer sheets
• Consider making your own laundry products – you can find recipes online.

Using these practices, I have found that the job of doing laundry has become an evolving challenge to reduce my environmental impact while keeping my family and me presentable!

Carol Good