Laundromatto Al Fresco

I come from a family that has always air-dried clothing throughout the year. In the summer, sheets and dresses flap in the wind on a spinning clothesline in the sunny part of the garden. In the winter, they hang from lines erected in the basement and drying racks in the spare room. I was often envious of the Downy-scented sweatshirts of my friends and couldn’t understand my mother’s love of “that fresh scent” that clothes dried outdoors get.

My dad told me that driers use 25% of a household energy bill. According to Project Laundry List, the figure is 5-10%. And although my father and I share the trait of sometimes forgetting to cite the sources of our statistics (which always seem to support our arguments), I would guess that 25% is a good estimate for his household, which has been eco-friendly and energy efficient for decades – so adding the use of a drier regularly probably would constitute about a quarter of his household's energy use.

Project Laundry List is a website dedicated to educating “people about how simple lifestyle modifications, including air-drying one’s clothes, reduce our dependence on environmentally and culturally costly energy sources” (quote taken from Mission Statement). It showcases artists’ interpretations of the beauty of clotheslines, offers links to environmentally friendly products and offers support for communities banned from using clotheslines. I didn’t know this actually was a problem, but Cecily Ross addresses it in her article in the Style section of the Globe and Mail today, where I found the link to the website.



Ross interviews the website’s founder, Alexander Lee, who believes that “a lot of people see laundry on a line as a flag of poverty.” That was certainly one of my reasons for wanting my mother to buy fabric softener and use a drier: all my other friends had slick machines that offered up soft and fluffy, scented clothes, whereas I had to do a couple of squats to get my jeans to lose the stiff consistency of an indoor-dried garment. I felt the odd one out, not keeping up with the laundering practises of the Joneses. When I went away to university, I mechanically dried all of my clothes with abandon; fading colour and losing elasticity in the process.

Fifteen years ago, the environmentally-friendly lifestyle with its patchouli-scented products were the domain of hippies and David Suzuki followers. And people who kept their houses at a lower temperature in winter and used lights only when necessary were considered misers. Now it has become de rigueur to wear organic cotton, use unbleached tampons and clean your house with green products. There had been a huge push for LCD lightbulbs and EnergyStar appliances that use less electricity. I am hoping that this trend will spread to how we clean our laundry: a clothesline of brightly coloured attire flapping in the wind will no longer represent the home of a poor family, but the home of an environmentally aware family.

And everyone, including me, will crave “that fresh scent” that my mother so loves.