We can’t shop our way out of climate disaster, but corporations want us to think we can.
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Normal days sitting at my desk? Perhaps. However, after a closing in on 30 years living in the deep south and/or Florida (we escaped) - a single day of doing anything outside (standing is often enough) and every damn thing i’m wearing is getting washed. It doesn’t make one whit of a difference how clean I was at the start of the day, them togs is soaked and disgusting. When your swampass has swampass and you can see the salt lines before you even take the shirt off and wring your socks out and you have to leave your sneakers out to dry even though you didn’t put a single toe in the water…
Nope. Just… nope.
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Not everyone gets to sit all day at an air condtioned desk, and even then, the underwear has something to say.
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Conversely, we used to be on the ‘three can plan’, with color coded trash bins for green waste, recyclables, and plain old trash. I was always able to fill the recyclable and green bins before the trash even got half full. Then they eliminated the plan because it was too expensive. Now the main people I see picking up recyclables are the houseless, and I fill my trash almost weekly with cardboard and woody trimmings (I still compost.)
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Yea, I dry everything on that as well. Except for bath towels. I wash and dry them on hot.
I hardly ever wash my jeans. I’m not in construction, so I just hang them up. They don’t even get worn that much in the first place. I’m pretty much always in shorts unless it’s cold and I work from home.
And as others have noted for quite a few things like shirts and the like, I wash and hang them to dry.
One thing we switched to are plant-based wash “sheets”. They are pretty concentrated and seem to work very well. Also better for the environment.
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Even if it weren’t for the social conditioning, the hordes of disapproving villagers with torches and pitchforks will keep me shackled to the tyranny of the laundry industrial complex.
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This 100% will result in people donating clothes that need to be laundered and seeing it as “environmentally helpful” too…
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I don’t know that I’ve ever gone a year without washing my jeans, but I definitely go months. It’s the same for sweatshirts & hoodies. T-shirts, underwear, and socks on the other hand (basically, anything that touches the parts of my body that get smelly) are 1 wear = 1 wash.
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Yeah… hot climates and dirty clothes can create a great place for bacteria, yeast, and fungus to grow too. Workout clothes, towels and underwear alone are enough to require one load per week for me. I might as well clean anything that stinks or looks messy along with that…
Some things I can get by without washing, but stains and smells make clothes unwearable faster than the odd hole will.
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yeah, i’m definitely on this type of cycle. Jeans go a week, though. but i’ll even wear the same shirt to yoga a couple times in a row before washing it unless it was a particularly sweaty session, because normally nobody is going to notice.
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We live in the desert. The washing machine water feeds some trees in the back yard. We use hippie greywater detergent. It all works out.
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Can you get clothes clean with an unclean machine?
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Great band name.
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I’d say it depends if the gunky parts contact the clothes you are trying to wash.
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Once or twice a year I’d set the washer for an x-large load, on hot, dump in detergent and bleach and nothing else. Coupla cold rinses, figured it was good.
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Nasty stuff on the inside gets rinsed off, and winds up in with the clothes. I’d wash the washer as described above when black gunk showed up unbidden on freshly washed clothes. Afterwards, I’d try to remove the black gunk from the clothes by hand, then divide that load of clothes into 2 or 3, depending on size, and re-wash it all.
Sure, micro plastic fibers can filter into the sewers poisoning animals, but we are still living with the legacy of SARS-2 COVID-19… Let’s not incubate new bacterial strains in our smelly unwashed clothes. We aren’t only cleaning clothes for superficial body odor concerns.
Washing machines should have better ways to filter smaller particles so they don’t end up in the water supply. If you have direct access to your drainage pipe, install an additional filter on it to get one last chance to grab more microfibers.
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We do the same, clothes worn outside the house are removed as soon as we get home. No street clothes touch our furniture.
House clothes don’t get washed as often, out of house clothes get washed regularly.
No shoes past the mud room either.
Been doing it for decades.
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