Rethinking how we do laundry.
Steps to reducing waste while washing your clothes.
Reducing garbage and waste with our laundry practices has been an ongoing transformation. Once we started thinking about our routines through a garbage awareness lens, we realized the American ‘norm’ was very wasteful–plastic detergent bottles, dryer sheets, water usage, and electricity.
To create less waste, avoid unnatural ingredients, reduce cost of supplies, and decrease our utilities, we’ve made small changes overtime and are always on the lookout for additional ways to improve our laundry game.
If you’re wanting to make an eco change, switching your laundry routine entirely can feel overwhelming, so pick one or two of our tips below to get you started:
Wear/use items multiple times before you wash. We’re not talking about undergarments, we’re talking about jeans, shirts, sweaters, and even shower towels. Wear them a couple times before washing. And hey, you’re the cleanest you’ll ever be after your shower, hopefully, so hang that towel up to dry and use it multiple times.
Laundry detergent. Check your laundry detergent’s ingredients. Are they natural? Do you know what they are? What’s the first one listed? Most likely, the first ingredient is water and you’re paying for the company to ship you a single-use plastic bottle containing mostly water and the ingredients listed after water are things you’ve never heard of before. At least, this was the case for us.
A first step to upping your eco friendly game, could be buying laundry detergent concentrate and doing your research on the ingredients they use to make it. You’ll get more loads out of one bottle and save on the amount of plastic waste you add to the dump.
An even better option is making your own. You’ll have control over the ingredients, it costs less, and you’re saving on wasteful packaging by reusing the same container for every batch. This has been our go-to: http://www.dwellinginhappiness.com/chemical-free-liquid-laundry-detergent/
What you put on your skin is just as important as what you put in it–it’s your largest organ, so be gentle to it.
Fabric softener. Similar to laundry detergent, fabric softener means lots of plastic waste and garbage ingredients with unnatural fragrances. Our solution is to make our own–mix white vinegar with your favorite essential oil. We’ve used lavender, wild orange, peppermint, cedar and sandalwood, or tea tree in the past. To our surprise, adding essential oil kicks the smell of vinegar, so no need to worry about clothes smelling like vinegar.
https://www.diynatural.com/homemade-fabric-softener-dryer-sheets/
Dryer sheets. Dryer sheets are another single-use item made of chemicals and unnatural fragrances. We’ve started replacing them with unscented, wool balls and adding essential oils for fragrance. Here’s a link with tips on how to use them:
https://www.cleanmama.net/2017/11/ditch-dryer-sheets-dryer-balls-rescue.html
We use these dryer balls and love that they are made from 100% wool, and free of pesticides, dyes, and fragrance.
Drying clothes. Replace your dryer with a drying rack or clothing line. We recently started hang drying our clothes after our dryer broke and thought, hey, we could keep doing this and it will probably save us on our utilities bill. (AND we won’t have to worry about dryer sheets.)
Have any other ideas or want to share how you’re reducing garbage in the laundry room? Comment below, we’d love to hear them!
