Air the Laundry, A Simple Way to Be Green

Monday, October 15th, 2007

Air the Laundry, A Simple Way to Be Green

Today is Blog Action Day, a day where bloggers take action and talk about ways to protect the environment. So in honor of this great cause, I thought I’d share a simple task I stumbled onto by mistake.

Image by steffenj

The place I’m staying the past week has a washing machine, but the dryer is broken. No worries, I thought, as I carefully hung all my clothes to dry on hangers in the open air. After doing this, I wondered why I didn’t do this all the time. Well, I know why, actually. Its because it takes more time to hang each on rather than just throw it all in to dryer.
How sad. Here are two great reasons to hang the clothes out to dry.

1) An opportunity to save energy and earth’s resources.
The wind and air that we breathe is free. This is a form of energy that we can use no matter where we live. Clothes don’t even have to be hung outside (particularly if the weather’s growing colder).

2) A stronger connection and feeling with earth.
After hanging out to dry, my clothes smelled and felt different. When I put on the crisp dry shirt, there was an element of closeness to the ebb and flow of nature. Hard, to describe, but I just felt more “connected”. In a frenetically fast-paced world, it’s easy to become numb. I realized that airing my laundry is a way to be revived and awakened ~it’s a blissful treasure.