My Idea

My idea is to give away drying racks at hardware stores over the course of several weekends the way Toronto Hydro did last April and May. No US utility or municipality has done this yet, as far as I know. I would also like to recruit a volunteer army of underemployed summer youth to help folks install clotheslines, while working to change city rules so that all new buildings design appropriate space for air drying clothes. No covenants or rules that totally ban clotheslines should remain in effect.

Did you know?

About 5.8 percent of residential electricty use goes towards the clothes dryer, according to DOE EIA statistics from 2001. See End-Use Consumption of Electricity 2001. If all Americans would use the clothesline or wooden drying racks, the savings would be enough to close several power plants.

Michael Bluejay has a great tool for calculating how much energy you use drying your clothes in a machine. Project Laundry List also provides a fairly sophisticated calculator, which you can save to your computer as an Excel file. See How Much Energy Can You Save by Greening Your Laundry Practices?

It typically costs 30 to 40 cents to dry a load of laundry in an electric dryer and approximately 15 to 20 cents in a gas dryer. Over its expected lifetime of 11-18 years, the average clothes dryer will cost you approximately $1,530 to operate. Learn more at Flex Your Power.

By the way...

The 5.8% of residential electricity use number is way off as a measure of energy used by drying clothes in an appliance. It does not take into account the millions of Americans who do their wash at commercial Laundromats and multi-family housing locations.

Furthermore, sixteen percent of American households use gas dryers. EIA does not keep statistics on the energy used by these machines, nor do they track--or have a way to track--energy used by laundry facilities at commercial establishments. Millions of Americans wash or have their clothes washed at commercial sector locations--universities, prisons, nursing homes, hospitals, restaurants, fish piers, and hotels, for example. Why do we pay for prisoners to have their laundry washed for them? Hmmm.

Finally, it is important to remember, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." The percentage of electricty used to dry is likely much higher in the median American household than in the mean or average household, because most people do not heat their homes and hot water with electricity and the average is skewed by those who use large amounts of energy in the home for peculiar uses, much more than it is skewed by the Amish.

About Me and the Project Laundry List story

When I was a Middlebury College student in 1995, Dr. Helen Caldicott gave a speech. She said, "If we all did things like hang out our clothes, we could shut down the nuclear industry." I was moved to action.

As a boy, my mother, who had Depression-era parents, instilled in me the frugal Yankee ethic. Benjamin Franklin, who grew up on Milk Street in Boston, says, "Waste not, want not." Indeed, he was way ahead of his time. He also said, "We must all hang together or we will all hang seperately."

Global weirding is the biggest problem facing humanity and that is why I started Project Laundry List. I wrote the first strategic plan as a Green Corps' Environmental Organizing Semester student in 1996.

Since that time, I have been working to make clotheslines a ubiquitous part of the American landscape, as they are in most other nations. We launched National Hanging Out Day (April 19) in 1998 and in 2007 we made the front page of the Wall Street Journal for starting a green movement. ABC World News even did a story in July 2008 where they introduced me as a "33 year-old bachelor lawyer from Concord, NH."

Today, there is legislation that will make it possible for more people to use outdoor clotheslines being considered in seven states from Hawaii to Maine.

I graduated from Vermont Law School in 2001 with both a J.D. and a Masters of Studies in Environmental Law. The Albany Environmental Outlook Journal once published an article which I wrote about clotheslines.

I am writing a book on laundry and working with Ben Davis to get President Obama and his family to re-install a clothesline at The White House. See http://www.right2dry.org.