The exciting world of washing machines

Water #3

A washing machine essentially works by feeding in some water at the bottom of the drum, heating it to the desired temperature and spinning the clothes violently so that the dirt is loosened in the water as they pass through. It then sucks out the dirty water periodically and starts the process again. Simple and efficient.

This means washing machines don’t actually need much water to do the job, only around 90 litres per load. They are quite carbon intensive though.

The good thing is, there’s lots we can do to make our clothes cleaning habits a bit more environmentally-friendly:

1. Don’t wash as often

I’m going to let you into a little secret: just because you wear something once, doesn’t mean it has to be washed (I think I’ve been wearing my trousers for about 3 or 4 months now).

2. Wash full loads

Hopefully pretty simple to figure out. Half a load will still use the same amount of water and energy, so fill that fucker up for maximum efficiency.

3. Wash at a low temperature

The difference in carbon emissions between a wash at 30C and 40C is about 0.4 kg. Compounded over a year at one wash a week, that adds up to 20 kg additional carbon emissions for a 10C increase in temperature (and I bet you can’t even tell the difference in how clean your clothes are). Modern washing machines are actually so good these days that you only ever really need to use the coldest setting anyway.

4. Don’t use the dryer

Tumble drying your weekly wash will add 48 kg carbon emissions a year.

Come one you lazy bastard.

5. Use a micro-plastic catcher

I must admit, I haven’t got round to this one myself, but I recently learned that an inordinate amount of plastic from our clothes (apparently around 60% of our clothes are made from plastic) enters our watercourses from washing our clothes. A Guppyfriend will sort that out.