You’d Be Surprised!
How much impact could air-drying clothes have on the environment?
It’s a hot day here in Colorado — it’s going to be over 100 degrees.
It’s also my laundry day… and the thought of running the dryer, heating up my basement and feeling that hot air rise through the house, and being sent out the dryer vent making the air around the house even hotter just kinda grossed me out.
So, I did a thought experiment about what would happen ecologically if everyone in the US (current population 329.5 million) air dried one load of laundry. What kind of ecological impact would that have?
I went to the book I wrote a while back called “Erase Your Carbon Footprint” and looked up the “Climate Constants” and the information comparing the washer spin energy consumption with the dryer tumble energy consumption for my math.
My dryer takes about 1 hour to dry the clothes and I calculated in the book that the energy consumed by that is 5.3 kilowatt hours (kWh). For each kWh, .85/lbs of CO2 emissions are created, so each dryer load creates 4.5 lbs of pollution. That’s roughly 5 lbs…