Washing & Laundry

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For comments on washing machines and tumble dryers, please see Appliances & Electrical.

Washing clothes and general laundering is one of the biggest eco-offenders in the household routine.  Large amounts of energy, chemicals and water are flushed down the drain almost daily in most houses. The most eco-friendly thing to do is wash less, wash at a lower temperature and use fewer chemicals. This is quite possible for most people to achieve without stinking and looking grubby. For instance, if you put a load on every day, cutting that down to 5 loads a week will make a big difference without much effort.

Whenever possible, do not tumble dry anything. Let it all waft dry in a gentle zephyr, bathed by the pellucid light of Mother Nature (if you live in Ithica, that is, otherwise radiators may come in useful). If space is at a premium and you don’t have a garden, think about getting one of those old-fashioned drying racks that winch up to the ceiling. Groovy. If you have lower ceilings, Brabantia do a retractable clothesline that is the absolute nuts (or to put it another way, really rather useful).

Traditional washing powders (etc.) contain a number of potentially harmful and chemically manufactured constituents. They probably cause a lot less damage on a day-to-day basis than the purveyors of eco-products would have you believe, but they do cause some harm and have the potential for causing much more. For instance, if bulk detergents are washed away during flooding they could reach the river and extinguish most of its life over many miles.

Why are they bad? Well, the manufacturing process often uses raw materials of an unsustainable nature and consumes quite a lot of energy. This can produce detergents with the following nasty features:

• Phosphates – used to soften the water and improve the wash, these are also good fertilisers. If they get into a river or lake in any quantity the algae and weeds will grow frantically, strip the water of oxygen, block out the light and generally make it impossible for anything else to live there. This is probably the biggest problem of them all. Phosphate replacements in traditional detergents tend to be mildly toxic to water life.
• Optical brighteners – make clothes seem brighter, but take ages to break down and can be toxic to aquatic beasties.
• Artificial colour and fragrance – not a massive problem, but can be a bit toxic in sufficient quantities.

So, using traditional detergents does not make you an eco-zero, but will certainly not lift you to eco-hero status either. And most people use more than is necessary; egged on, of course, by the manufacturers. If you do want to carry on using the traditional detergents, the biological ones probably give best wash results with least environmental harm.

Good Guide is an interesting American site that is highly rated. It gives 'factory-to-landfill' ratings of various laundry products for an ethical, ecological and health combo. There are many USA/UK crossover products so this site is worth a quick peek, but it is heavily based on corporate accountability measures and so tends to rate companies more on their management systems than actual performance.  

The eco-laundry products cover the full range of washing and drying consumables, including environmentally friendly detergents, stain removers and fabric softeners. These all seem to be pretty good, with various user experience blogs suggesting that the best are soap nuts and eco-balls or discs. These are very cheap per wash, kind to clothes, kind on colours and gentle on allergy sufferers. They also act as fabric softeners.

However, some research conducted under laboratory conditions a few years ago suggested that none of the eco-washing products tested were any better than washing in water alone. They concluded that washing with highly concentrated, traditional detergents at low temperature was the best solution. Personally, I find the eco-detergents very good and Magnus finds the eco-balls excellent for general washing (though need extra help for tougher grime), so perhaps you should try a variety of eco-products to see how they perform for your clothes and your dirt. See the bottom of this section for my thoughts on detergent vs. plain water washing.  

The soap nuts are simply fruits harvested from trees common to parts of India (amongst others). The shells contain natural soaps, which clean clothes gently yet thoroughly. They are also very good with hard water, often negating the need for fabric conditioners completely. Whites will need some eco-bleach or similar to recharge their glow, as soap nuts do not have any whitening agents in them. A reassuring vote of confidence for soap nuts is that the British Museum uses them to clean their manuscripts.

Eco-balls and discs seem to work by minerals or ceramics reacting with the water to change its physical and chemical properties; there is some mention of ionised oxygen too. The descriptions all seem a little bit voodoo for my liking, but I have read many accounts of happy users, so the mystery surrounding how they work may be irrelevant.

There are also various magnetic gizmos for removing limescale, which have the additional benefit of acting as fabric softeners. Or vice versa, depending on one’s priorities. These appear to be fairly effective, but may rattle around noisily when in use.

What to do

Using the eco-laundry products is a pretty safe way of getting things right: the solid cleaners like soap nuts, eco-balls and laundry discs seem to be the best choice all round, but will occasionally need a boost from traditional detergents or eco-stain removers. Otherwise, I would suggest the following:

• Wash clothes only when they actually need it.
• Wash at low temperatures whenever possible.
  
• Avoid chlorine bleach.
  
• Use one or more eco-laundry product – soap nuts, eco-balls or discs, detergents, bleaches, stain removers etc.
  
• If not, use biological detergents unless you have any particular reason not to (such as skin sensitivity).
  
• Use refills to reduce packaging.
  
• Don’t tumble dry.

Ridiculous bonus tip

When I was travelling a lot, I used to get into the shower with my clothes and wash them at the same time as I washed myself, sharing soap and shampoo. Once I got the technique right, it was remarkably effective. And in the end it meant I only needed to carry one bottle of all purpose soap-washing-liquid-washing-up-liquid-shampoo-conditioner stuff that I would top up whenever I came across anything vaguely similar. Superb. 

Detergent vs. water only

The research suggesting that many of the eco-washing products were no better than plain water on its own got me to thinking. An unusual occurrence for me, but this is what I thought: much of the world’s population manage to wash their clothes in cold, muddy river water with only a hard lump of soap to help. This seems to work fairly well. We, on the other hand, wash our clothes in specially designed machines using hot, clean water (even 30^oC is actually pretty warm). The clothes that we wash are often not that dirty to start with, so it is entirely possible that most of the time we do not need to use detergent at all, but do so out of habit and misconception. Perhaps detergents are superfluous to our everyday requirements, needed only for our grubbier garments or to make our whites really sparkle.

If any of you actual know about this, please tell us about it in the Forum.

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