Do The Green Thing: January's Action: Use a clothes peg (don't use a tumble)

Use a clothes peg (don't use a tumble)

Your tumble dryer has a Jekyll and Hyde personality. Outwardly it’s all white and clean and unassuming, but inside lurks an energy-munching, CO2-spewing monster. If everyone in the UK with a dryer did just one load less drying a year, we’d save enough CO2 to power 36% of all the street lights in Northern Ireland.

So next time you’re about to put your clothes in the machine, put your clothes on the rack or the line instead. Just one load less makes a difference.

Ecowashinglines.co.uk in the UK or Urbanclotheslines.com in the US/Candada have everything you need for environmentally friendly drying.
If you don’t have a garden or even a bath to stick a clothes rack in, how about hanging one on your ceiling? Since warm air rises, your clothes dry even faster. If that wasn’t enough, wet clothes act as a natural humidifier and might need less ironing when dry. Ingenious.
According to this grandmother's guide,machines destroy our clothes while they dry them – who’s gonna argue?
If you’re into multi-tasking, this video shows how to batter your clothes dry with killer martial arts moves. Sort of Crouching Tiger, Drying Laundry.

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More energy-saving Green Things to do >>

Here’s a thing… a year’s worth of clothes dried by even the most energy-efficient machine still produces as much CO2 as a Nissan 4x4 on a round trip from London to Aberdeen. As it happens, Aberdeen boasts the first primary school in mainland Scotland to be powered by wind but we’re not sure how they dry all their school uniforms.

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