Cheap green tip: use (a lot!) less laundry detergent

I've been hanging my clothing to dry for about a year now, indoors when it's cold and wet, and outdoors during those glorious few Northwest months of summer. But I still occasionally dry laundry when some item is needed right away, or we have a big load of towels or jeans.

One of the challenges of air-drying heavy items such as towels and jeans is that they end up hard and stiff. I usually add a half cup of vinegar to the rinse cycle and shake these items out a few times while they're drying, and that helps. However, they still end up a little stiff.

One recommendation I've read is to add less detergent, because part of the stiffness is due to all the soap not completely rinsing out. I was skeptical about that because I already use half the recommended laundry soap detergent whenever I wash.

After my daughter's bubble party, we had all these wet towels that the kids had used to dry off after running through the sprinklers. My original plan was to wash them at home and dry them at the laundromat, but when the day turned out to be gloriously sunny, I switched tactics.

I washed the towels, not with half the scooper cup of detergent, but less than one-fourth, figuring that since the towels had only been used once, they weren't that dirty. I added vinegar to the rinse cycle, and then hung them over chairs on our deck to dry. They didn't end up quite as fluffy as towels dried in the dryer, but still, no stiffness! Once more, I'm a new believer!

We have a winner!

The Winner:

We went to a wedding today at which Hershey's kisses were the favors. I took a few, only to discover that I accidently sat on one on the way home and stained the back of my dress with chocolate. Since the drive home was more than an hour, the chocolate stain was pretty set by the time we arrived. Thus, I had a chance to test out my homemade laundry pretreatment spray, using this recipe*. It worked like a charm: I sprayed the stain, rubbed it and rinsed it, and it was gone within seconds. Buh-bye, Resolve! (formerly Spray and Wash).

The Jury Is Still Out...

On this year's garden. As with last year, we planted seeds and a few starts indoors back in April, and moved them outside the second week of May. But May in Tacoma has been rough, alternating between hot sunny days and cold, stormy, windy ones, and these poor young plants have been battered. I keep reminding myself that last year my lettuce looked wilted and battered, and then suddenly revived in early June to produce a fantastic crop. So I'm crossing my fingers that our veggies and herbs can come back this year also.

=====================

* If you follow this recipe, be sure to read the tips and warnings at the end (under the ad links).

Small changes again

I was overwhelmed a few days ago, but I decided I need to keep making small changes. One is with laundry pretreatment. I use eco-friendly detergent, wash in cold water, hang most things to dry (unless it's heavy stuff like blankets, or I need something right away), and when I do use a dryer, I reuse squares of aluminum foil instead of dryer sheets to reduce static cling.

However, I still use Resolve (formerly Spray and Wash) to pretreat stains. That's partly due to the fact that I can buy a huge bottle of the stuff at Costco, and because it seemed to be the easy thing to do with a young child who gets a lot of stains on her clothing.

So a few days ago I decided to check out Resolve's ingredients list on the company's web site, and then google some of the ingredients to see whether/how toxic they are. And yikes!, several of them are, such as the first ingredient listed after water, ALCOHOL C-12 C-16 POLY (1-6) ETHOXYLATE. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this compound is "A major threat to the environment in case of a spill. Immediate steps should be taken to limit spread. Can easily penetrate the soil and contaminate ground water and nearby streams. Very toxic to aquatic organisms."

So I found a recipe online for making homemade laundry pretreatment spray from water, glycerin, castile soap and borax*. I've made it and will try it. One logistical advantage is that you can spray clothing and let the stuff sit, whereas the instructions for using Resolve say that you must launder clothes right away after spraying it. (Or else what? Will it burn a hole in the clothing?) This recipe will save me the half-hour or more before doing laundry of endlessly spraying stains, plus I can treat stains right away, instead of waiting until laundry day.

Another small thing I'm trying to do is buy gas at someplace else besides Arco (which is part of BP). I found a Chevron station recently with gas just as cheap. I know that Chevron's environmental record isn't that great either (is there any oil/gas company that is?), but I think the current goal is to send a message to BP so that they take their responsibility for the Gulf spill and cleanup.

===================

* Borax is toxic if ingested, so keep out of children's reach. Also, if you follow this recipe, be sure to read the tips and warnings at the end (under the ad links).

What do you do when you're overwhelmed?

I'm feeling overwhelmed by a few things environment-related. The first is, of course, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which is appearing more and more each day to be an environmental catastrophe the scope of which the world has never before seen. Even my daughter seems to realize it. She had heard about it from radio news stories in the car and was asking questions, so I showed her some photos of the oil spill on the Internet. Her response was, "Mama, we have to do something. What can we do to help?"

But so far, I have done nothing. It can be so easy to get (choose one: busy, lazy, apathetic) about these things. But I also feel overwhelmed because I realize that my efforts alone aren't enough, that we as a society have to drastically change.

I am also feeling this way because I recently watched the No Impact Man movie, after waiting for it for months at the library. It's incredible just how radical the Beavan family was in their decision to live one year with as little environmental impact as possible. And it's a reminder just how many things I have yet to change.

But from reading the book, I know that Colin Beavan wanted to be so radical because he no longer wanted to sit on the sidelines with causes he cares about, because he wanted to see what was possible in terms of reducing one's impact, and because he wanted to become a credible spokesperson for environmental issues by walking the talk. He found that some things were too onerous to continue after the year was up (such as doing laundry by hand), but other things made his and his family's lives better.

I think I have to remember that. To give a (very) small example of better, I have seasonal allergies and year-round allergies to dust mites, so I have a runny nose pretty much all the time. I used to carry tissue with me constantly, and no matter how carefully I thought I checked my pockets, invariably I'd overlook a tissue in some item of clothing. This meant that whenever I did my laundry, I'd find small pieces of tissue on all the clothes in the load when the wash was done.

I no longer use tissue but handkerchiefs instead, and guess what? Even if I leave one in a pocket, no tissue scraps on the rest of my laundry! OK, small victory, but maybe it's remembering those things that will help me not feel overwhelmed. And maybe also motivate me to do something about the BP oil spill.

On air-drying clothing

When we moved into my in-laws home here in Tacoma, they had a working washing machine, but a dryer that no longer worked, which means that we have to go to the laundromat to dry out clothing.

I've read countless times about how hanging clothes to dry is a much more environmentally sound choice than using a dryer. I have always hung handwashed items on drying racks inside, but when it came to hanging a whole load outdoors, the city kid in me had countless objections: What about pollution? Pollen (I have hayfever)? Bird poop? I posed these questions several times on web sites or blogs that advocated line-drying, and was frustrated that no one ever answered them.

As the mother of a four-year-old, I find myself needing to do "emergency washes" between laundry days more frequently than I would like. With one car and no more bus service, getting to the laundromat can now be a challenge on occasion, so recently I started laying some of the laundry outside, draping it or hanging it on chairs on our deck. One pleasant surprise has been that in the warm summer sun, most items dry within an hour (towels are the exception).

This doesn't fully address my questions and concerns above: August, fortunately, isn't pollen month, and it's the only month between May and October when something or other isn't pollinating. Our deck faces the Puget Sound rather than roads and traffic, so pollution isn't an issue. Also, I believe that our deck is only visible to our two most immediate neighbors, so eyesore concerns aren't much of an issue. (I have read stories of folks who line-dry getting complaints from neighbors). And by placing items on the deck, birds are much less likely to drop on them just by flying by. Not everyone is as fortunate to have a place like our deck to hang things.

One tip: I've seen some complaints in discussions about the rough, crinkly feeling of some items post-air dry, especially towels and jeans. I have found that adding some vinegar to the rinse cycle helps, and then hand-fluffing the item after it's completely dry will rid the item of its roughness.

Another blogger, Elisa's Green Scene, wrote a post on incrementalism, in other words, taking baby steps to be green. She's all for it, because if we had to reach 100% of the goal the first time out, then none of us would ever accomplish anything. This, then, is another baby step for me.

Because hauling water is too much work for anybody

No Impact Man is my favorite environmental blog, one that has provided much inspiration on my own green journey. The blogger, Colin Beavan, along with his wife and daughter (same age as my own), spent a year trying to make as little impact on the environment as they could, while living in New York City. After the year was up, they evaluated their experiences and decided which modern conveniences they wanted back, and which ones they would continue to live without. They chose to continue to live without TV or air conditioning, deciding that those were luxuries, not necessities.

They chose to bring the washing machine back as a necessity. As Colin explained it, doing laundry by hand is drudgery, and therefore some sort of equipment to make laundering easier is a necessity, not just for wealthy Westerners, but for everyone on the planet.

I got a sense of this yesterday. I was doing laundry, including handwashing several dry-clean only items in the bathtub. (See Ask Annie on how to wet-clean dry-clean only clothing). I washed the items with castille soap, a very mild natural liquid soap, leaving me with gray water when I was finished. Gray water is water that is dirty, but not toxic.

I've read several green tips that suggest recycling gray water by using it to water plants.* Since we're trying to take care of the yard now and we haven't had much rain lately, I decided to try this. After about six trips in which I carried a bucket and my daughter a watering can, we'd only watered a few plants in the yard, the tub was still full, and we were tired. To finish the job might take several hours.

I'm not sure whether those who recommend using gray water this way are talking about watering a couple of houseplants, as opposed to your landscape; and I don't think I've ever read any suggestions about easy ways to haul the water. In any case, I feel about hauling the way Colin feels about doing laundry by hand: it's drudgery for anybody.

In case you're thinking about the fact that in many places in the world, people have to haul water or else they have none: this is true, but it is also why many non-governmental agencies work to provide such communities with close-at-hand, easily accessible water sources, because hauling water is so much work. In places where hauling water is necessary, generally it's women and girls who do it, preventing the women from doing other productive work, and keeping the girls out of school. Most NGO's also know that one of the best ways to help a community rise from poverty is to make sure the women can earn a living and the girls can go to school. So unless I can figure out a better way to move this gray water,** I don't think I'll be using it to water the plants in the yard anymore.

==================

* Some people recycle gray water by using it to flush their toilet. If you pour enough water into a toilet bowl, the pressure will force anything in the bowl down. An advantage to this method is that if the gray water is from the tub, you don't have to haul it anywhere.

** Given the fact that water shortages are a real problem in some places now, and maybe everywhere in the not-too-distant future, it might behoove me to try to find a better way to haul it.

Really cheap green tip

I've read that your typical dryer sheets contain a lot of toxic chemicals. The alternatives such as natural dryer sheets are very expensive. I've tried dryer balls, but they're also expensive ($10 for 2), and I never found them to work very well at dealing with static cling.

So here's a cheap tip: use aluminum foil as a dryer sheet to reduce static cling. I recycle aluminum foil if it's fairly clean (not used to cover meat, for example) by washing it off and letting it air dry. Then I cut it into sheets that are about the size of your typical dryer sheet and throw it in the dryer with my clothes. Some people recommend rolling the foil into a ball, but I've found it works best if it's flat--it will roll itself into a ball by the time your clothes are done. I then unroll it and use it for the next load. I can reuse the same bit of aluminum foil in the dryer for about five loads, which is great since my municipality doesn't accept aluminum foil for recycling (even though aluminum is one of the most recyclable materials on earth).

The foil, of course, won't provide your clothes with a sweet smell. However, if your laundry detergent was scented, your clothes will retain the scent of the detergent when they're dry. If you used unscented detergent and want a final scent, wet a washcloth and either sprinkle it with a few drops of essential oil (such as lavender), or with a scented hair conditioner, and throw that into your dryer.

Note on line drying: I have a dryer rack in my house, which I use for things I handwash (often, my preschooler's clothes!). However, I haven't taken the plunge toward outdoor line drying yet. I've asked line drying advocates how you prevent pollution, pollen and bird poop from getting on your clothes, and no one has yet answered me. And for those living in urban apartments (which was us in Boston, although not currently), you may not have the space to do it. One of my goals is to save enough to buy an energy saving Spin Dryer from Laundry Alternatives.