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TechnoratiIn recent months, the provincial government has come to the realization that hanging one's laundry "al fresco" is good for the environment. Clothesline bans have finally been lifted. So where are all the wet socks?
Clothesline bans were a product of contracts between municipalities and home-builders as they attempted to please the ever-fastidious neobourgeoisie who would rather run up exorbitant electricity bills and drown polar bears than hang their unmentionables in public.
Clotheslines are, after all, esthetically incorrect, aren't they? They're unpleasant-looking - with or without clothes on them. They're a reminder of the days of yore when our grandmothers wore curlers to the grocery store and hydro lines were above ground.
Clotheslines are a symbol of the working class and households without clothes dryers. There are a staple of rural settings, where no one seems to mind the sight of knickers waving like flags in the wind. But many believe clotheslines don't belong in upper-middle-class neighbourhoods with no trees. They're a thing of the past. They aren't modern. They aren't chic.
What is chic, it seems, is living beyond one's means, living on credit, having it all, taking it all and disregarding the environment.
Since the lifting of clothesline bans, I have not seen an influx of clotheslines in single-family residential areas. Why? Because we still have the mind-set that we are above clotheslines. When you spend a lot of money on a house in the "right" neighbourhood, the last thing you want is someone's flannel bedsheets blocking your view. After all, isn't this why the builder cut down all those trees in the first place?
Even in older, more established neighbourhoods that have clotheslines, they aren't used a lot, much to environmentalist David Suzuki's chagrin. Mother Nature's free source of wind and solar power is unused and unappreciated.
Perhaps drying clothes on a clothesline is too labour-intensive for some. First you have to purchase and put up a line, and then you actually have to go outside and peg your wet items to it (it will maybe 10 minutes of your time). And you can't use your favourite expensive fragranced dryer sheets (liquid fabric softener instead?). Oh, and if it rains ...well, forget it.
The tradeoff for accepting the inconvenience of clotheslines is fewer greenhouse gas emissions, a lower electricity bill, clothing that smells like fresh air and loofah-like towels (my personal favourite).
But if you want to use a clothesline, what do you do in the dead of winter? I have childhood memories of cardboard-like clothing coming off the line on crisp January afternoons. Yes, the sun still shines in January. And there's enough warmth in that sun to effectively dry your towels. And even if you only use your clothesline during the summer months, isn't that half the battle? A little bit is better than nothing.
Perhaps embarrassment is the issue. No one wants the neighbours to see their linens or undergarments. For intimate clothing items, there is such a thing as an indoor line, or a portable unit that sits on a patio or deck.
The anti-clothesline phenomenon must be a North American thing. Certainly in Europe and many other places, clotheslines are central features of homes and vibrant parts of the landscape. They are so prevalent in many places that they are the norm. Some homes I have visited in Austria and Germany have clothesline rooms, with doors leading out to balconies for convenience. Eco-friendliness is not new, but rather traditional. And North Americans seem to have lost an affinity for all things traditional.
I don't find clotheslines offensive. What could be offensive about clean laundry? And clotheslines don't make a political statement about one's social or financial status. What they do reveal is a household that cares enough about the environment to have a positive impact on it.
Jane Etherington is a member of the Whig-Standard's Community Editorial Board.
© 2008 Osprey Media
44 Comments so far
Show AllWhen I moved into my current neighborhood 17 years ago at the end of a cul-de-sac, we had a perfect clothesline location that hardly anyone could see. Didn't get any citations over it, but it was another excuse for our neighbors to be nasty about us. Finally gave up, as they made sure to bar-b-cue with plenty of kerosene smoke when our stuff was out. Another ridiculous subarban activity is bar-b-cuing and smoking the food. Talk about making your air unbreathable, especially where I live with attached houses. Smoke gets right into the house.
My clothesline is my shower rod, so they haven't all disappeared. I just live in a wind tunnel and my knickers would be on someone else's car, tree, porch, name it!
And people say "I am only one person how can I make a difference"
Well there you go Clothes lines.Save energy utilize wind and solar power.
Want another tip. A porch with a sloping roof. You can open your windows and the porch instantly cools the air without electricity.
Awnings retrofitiing windows the same princple.
or how about Shade trees. Long ago I read one shade tree is eqibulent to 10 air conditioners.
ever hear of Treec windbreaks. Good for saving on heating bills.
Or how about building your home so it can avail it to say more sunshine in winter and less wind.
Drying clothes inside. I have a window in the winter where the morning sun is strong enough to dry clothes very quickly. On sunny winter days my furnace barelys comes on. No not because I am very well insulated. Because I take advantage of the sun opening my drapes when the sun hits those windows.
oh getting back to those frozen clothes on the line .I remember mom bringing them in and hanging them atinside door sills. And by the way even back in the 50's there were winter days in Central Pennsylvania where clothes could dry on the line. We also had wooden dryers for the inside.My sister used hers over a floor heat register.
So you see without much expense at all anyone can save energy. The question is do you want to be pointed out as a square john by others ?
I mean they never worry about tomorrow or their children's children and they are in the majority.
Come on get yourself a clothes line and some clothes pins. You can say the clothes pins are for crafts and the clothes line is possibly for and emergency suicide kit . They will believe it.
Good article, I'm totally getting an indoor clothesline for my apartment.
jake123 - I couldn't agree more! Little strokes fell great oaks as they say. I hang my wash and love it (with the exception of the bird bombs sometimes). I also do lots of other little different things for the environment (compost, close windows early to keep house cool rather than AC., etc). It all helps, makes me feel good and saves me $$!
We need to lose all those nattering naybobs of negativism...
Colleen
Clotheslines - the solution to American Imperialism. Yeh, sure.
Growing up, we had a fixed backyard clothesline. Granted, the closest neghbors were hidden by the woods, but it's lead me to think about how I'd like to do things in my own adult life. To this day, line dried clothing is still one of my favorite smells (right up there with cut grass, tomato plants and winter woodsmoke).
My partner and I now share a studio apartment (with our cat). It's a tight squeeze, but when laundry day rolls around, we unfold our drying racks, hang clothing from hangers on the shower rod, and lay our sweaters on top of towels on any flat space we can find. We don't have to sit up until 11PM waiting for the dry cycle to end...we just hang items overnight and they're ready to wear the next day. Our clothes go through less wear and tear, and we save a ton of money.
I'd love to see a return to low tech solutions. Certainly, this is not the big fix. It's going to be a combination of things that makes the turnaround. Cutting down in ALL aspects of our lives will save us a lot in the long run.
For those who are worried that we need to have a stay-at-home person to complete household chores in a slow, low-tech sort of way....Perhaps if we gave up our addiction to gadgets, multiple-car households and more indoor than outdoor space, we could afford to have at least one family member stay home. Spouses and partners could alternate working days. We are chained to our long work weeks for many reasons, and buying big homes and "stuff" to fill them is a huge part ouf our debt.
petsr4ever07 - We had a '92 Metro, manual, that got 50+ mpg on the highway at it's peak. I loved that robin's egg blue car
collinsa-that is the one thing I nag my kids about the most. I'm constantly pulling clean clothes out of the laundry.
I think I'll use the terminology "solar/wind dryer" from now on.
We also don't use our dishwasher very often. We've measured and we use less water in our sink, plus, we use that greywater on our plants afterwards.
Neighbors were in Nova Scotia for 4 weeks and said they saw tons of clothes on clotheslines.
Just wash less. That's all around energy conservation. Unless you've really been sweating or developed a nasty stain, why can't you wear clothes a couple times before you wash them?
I have hung clothes out all my life, when I lived in a big city, and now when I am living in the country. I wash the dishes myself, and most of our garbage goes to our chickens. I drive a '91 Geo-Metro to work and back, (which is 68 miles roundtrip), and I get 47 miles to the gallon. We will be heating mostly with wood this winter, with propane back-up. The wood we cut is all from dead trees. My husband has a big vegetable garden, and he does all the canning. The only thing we don't do is raise animals for food. We don't even eat our chickens, just the eggs. All our animals are pets, but we are not vegetarians, just can't eat anything we have to see every day. I think we are doing pretty good, and we are enjoying every minute of it. We live in North Dakota, by the way.
We put up a clothesline about 2 years ago and wish we'd done it much, much sooner. It's one of my most enjoyable "chores" and it's not really one, at that. I love being outside listening to the birds, looking up at the vastness of our universe, feeling the sun (or wind, drizzle--whatever is coming my way that day.) My reward is wonderful, fresh smelling clothes, a more manageable electric bill and a little less harm to the environment.
Jacob Freeze is entirely right about the catastrophic ecological disruption that has been sowed by humans. And about the fact that almost no one wants to actually see this, and talk about this, and work on any efforts to begin to address this now, ourselves. Too big and scary, so we talk about something else. Not that clotheslines are bad things.
Pretty sure i disagree though about imagining that we could use military means to halt the march of disruption. Currently the number one US producer of atmospheric carbon is the US military, and the entire military mindset is about domination and destruction, not about restoration and nurturing.
So i think about rolling catastrophes providing us the opportunity to change our minds... and change our understanding... and change our actions... and change our lives, so that we together change the way humans live on and affect the Earth.
Work where you are, with what you have, and with the people in your life. Be bold, and make major changes, and be willing to realize that yes this all means major disruption of habitual lifestyles. Get on with it.
As rolling ecological catastrophes roll, it very likely means lots of us are going to live considerably shorter lives that we may have imagined we were getting used to expecting. We were all always going to die anyway. Don't we prefer to live bravely and face the challenges of our times, than to meander down habitual paths of conformity and consumerism and human supremacy?
Dryers also break the fibers of your clothing so your clothes will not last as long if you use a dryer to dry them.
I hung my clothes on a line in the basement even when I lived in Seattle. I live in the Mojave desert now and hang them over the railing on the second floor of my house. I have a rack that I use to hang small things which I keep in one of the closets in my bedroom when I am not using it.
I have 22 fruit trees in a hedgerow planting along my lot line, and a garden that provides an abundant supply of vegetables and treats like vine ripened cantaloupe. Garden ripened fruits and vegetables taste great, the stuff that is raised for its shipping properties that are sold at the supermarkets doesn't even come close. I had fresh tomatoes from my garden this year on into February and I am picking them already this summer. If I had a little greenhouse I would have them all year.
Back to the landers:
Check out the "Whole Earth Catalog". It is as relevant today as it was in the sixties. I think the "Mother Earth News" is still around too.
We don't need big technological fixes. There are low tech solutions that work well and can be employed right now. The Hippies did the research and groundwork for us.
It's obvious that most people born after the sixties could not peel a banana unless it came with a CD rom. But they had better learn how to grow food and build things if it means survival.
Kent Shaw, way to go if your goal is to stop folks from thinking at all about what they can do as individuals, AS WELL AS getting a whole bunch of people to act together as a force to be reckoned with.
First things first. Work on the little things you can actually change as one person, while working on a plan to change other big things together.
Here's what I'm doing now: there are no incandescent light bulbs in our house; we reclaim shower water, water used to wash produce, and other non-toxic kitchen-use water to flush toilets and water plants; we have no lawn at all, just native vegetation that creates habitat for birds and insects; we have virtually no garbage - our first-line action is not to purchase anything that will create garbage, and then everything goes into compost or meaningful recycling; I never use a store-provided paper bag or plastic produce bag - I bring cloth and net bags from home; I bring my own containers to the ice-cream store and my own coffee cup if I'm buying coffee from the mom-and-pop coffee-monger down-town; and yes, my husband hangs our laundry up to dry. That's what we do at our house.
On a national and global level, we work with Progressive Democrats of America www.pdamerica.org on the Global Warming Issues Organizing Team, which has a good strategy for how to make the big changes. It's time to stop putting down people who are thinking about making changes and actually working on change, and encourage them instead.
It is amazing how much advertising fantasies and other cultural programmings have made the simple drying of clothes in the air a challenge.
If we can not overcome minor inconveniences and delusions and just hang our stuff on a line, then we are screwed.
kent shaw: Thanks for asking about my "solutions" to the whole spectrum of ecological catastrophes that are about to roll over us. Unfortunately, I don't have any "solutions," no matter how radical, and neither does anyone else. It's a testament to the nullity of public debate on this issue that anyone can even ask about "solutions," as if we were still living in 1964, when there was still a chance to avoid catastrophic degradation of the environment.
What we can do now is give future generations a little hope for partial recovery, and even this relatively modest aim would require a radical commitment equally repulsive to liberals, conservatives, and virtually everyone else except a few shock-troops from ELF and anti-whaling pirates from GreenPeace.
The first order of business is shutting down as many oil fields as possible, from Texas to Saudi Arabia, and denying any remaining fields access to global markets. Russia would defend its fields with nuclear weapons, but its pipelines to Europe and China are still vulnerable. Shutting down oil production involves significant military action, and significant risk of military retaliation, but there is no risk-free strategy that offers any possibility of diminishing the worst consequences of an already inevitable ecological collapse. If remaining oil reserves find their way into the atmosphere, however slowly, all conceivable counter-measures will be overwhelmed.
The second order of business is preventing further destruction of the rain-forest in Brazil and elsewhere, and none of the relevant countries will act without compulsion. The alternative is allowing lumber barons and peasant scavengers to finish cutting the lungs out of the planet.
The third step is replanting forests on a global scale, and transplanting most of the bourgeoisie from their unsustainable suburbs to mobile work-camps on the frontiers of desertification.
As radical and even absurd as my suggestions may appear to so-called "concerned citizens" of all political persuasions, none of them offers any hope of "solutions" for us or our children, and all we can really hope for is a slightly better chance of recovery in the distant future.
Personal environmental actions, such as using a clothesline, need to be complementary with political action. Personal action without political action is inadequate and ineffective. Political action without personal action is hypocritical.
A line sounds lovely and we have a big backyard where no one would be offended. But we also have allergies to pollens that are around three quarters of the year. If we line-dried, we would not be able to stand our clothes. I tried, and the clothes proved to be pollen-traps. The sheets were especially bad. Doubling up on antihistamines doesn't seem very appealing health-wise; we take enough of them as it is. So we covered our roof in solar panels to take the load off the grid. It's not a perfect solution (we live in California, so clothes-drying on a line works great...except for the pollen) but we get a lot of sun a lot of the year, so we just hope it evens out over time. And we don't use dryer sheets and somehow the clothes smell fine. Just like dry cotton, linen, and bamboo. Anyone out there try bamboo clothes? Bamboo is a great new fiber.
Truth_Forward July 14th, 2008 6:46 pm
Correction: Nice smelling clothes, a Saturday afternoon wth Grandma and some delicious blueberry pie, what could be better?
Substitute Sweet Potato pie and I'm with you.
We miss seeing those sexy women hanging clothes on a clothesline
Correction: Nice smelling clothes, a Saturday afternoon wth Grandma and some delicious blueberry pie, what could be better?
Unfortunately I live in an apartment complex where clotheslines are banned. What's the solution? My wife and I take our clothes over to my grandmother's house and use her line. Nice smelling clothes and a Saturday afternoon with grandma, what could be better?
As someone who line drys my laundry, I have found packinging is the key to acceptance. Instead of calling it a clothes line, refer to it as a wind and solar powered clothes dryer--I'm not kidding it works.
Jacob Freeze July 14th, 2008 12:26 pm
Bourgeois self-congratulation for an infinitesimal slow-down in the rate of destruction is just another distraction from discussing the sort of radical transformation of society that could actually have a "positive impact" on the fate of the Earth.
Please provide examples of your solutions.
OK, when you have been therapeuted(?) by hanging out the clothes, you can do a further meditational exercise by washing the dishes. I'm quite serious. It is not a chore if you get your mind right. Get rid of the dishwasher. Personally I find it quicker anyway -- it takes an age to load decently, and it seems I am the only one in the house who can do it -- but it certainly uses less power to do it by hand. Water usage is the about same.
"Jake123" thinks a slightly less negative impact is the same as a positive impact... So if he gives me access to his bank account, I promise to steal $98 instead of $100, and he can buy himself some smart-pills with the "extra" $2.
Those of us who have lived or had extended visits to third world countries no that cloths-lines are a luxury, as they more often then not, just use the ground. Here in Honolulu we use the hedge when it's sunny (no cloths pins just throw it on the hedge) and when it rains we use the cloths-line in the carport/garage. This along with our solar hot water has lowered our electric bill about 50%. Next step is voltaic then maybe a chem. toilet.... Oh, it feels good to be vegetarian and green - so PC.
I have one in the attic. clothes dry quickly rain or shine and there is no rushing outside to get the clothes in a rain shower.
amy6 July 14th, 2008 12:15 pm
I saw in the Dallas paper a few days ago that a lady tried to hang her laundry on a clothesline and her POA made her take it down.
There's energy efficency for you. Texas air is quite fresh and the clothes smell lovely.
I love to hang clothes. It's therapeutic.
I've hung out 3 or 4 loads today and on a day like today, even in the north, they are dry in no time. We're not good planners, don't do the wash first thing in the morning, hang some loads as late as 5 or 6 in the afternoon, and rarely have any problems with things not drying in a timely fashion. You don't need to be a stay-at-home mom. With even the slightest breeze, clothes outside dry faster than in the dryer, even towels.
And I'm noticing something else about these types of tasks. This does not feel inconvenient. I'm outside, birds are outside, and sunsets and the neighbors. I'm moving around, bending and stretching. Somehow there is no sense of this taking more time. Anything that is even a little enjoyable is better than something that has no enjoyment whatsover, and moving clothes from the washer to the dryer is just something to get over with. Taking them outside usually has some unexpected reward, maybe just going out. I don't have to do anything else while I'm hangin up clothes. It's real mental freedom, and is always pleasant to be able to do without some machine or gadget.
I use my clothesline in summer (about 6 months of the year, actually). The urban dirty air seems to be offset by the freshness.
But instead of snarky comments, maybe consider the schedules of many homemakers. In order to hang clothes outside, you really have to do laundry in the morning. That's fine for me -- I'm a self-employed writer. But it would have been very difficult when I was a lawyer, married to a techie, juggling getting two kids to daycare or preschool or elementary school in time to get to court 45 minutes away. With the dryer, I could toss a load in after supper and it was ready before bedtime. Given the number of dual-job (or triple job) and single-parent households, it's a wonder laundry gets done at all.
In some places, people are worried about theft. (In one country I visited, you never hang laundry even in the interior courtyard unless someone is going to stay home and keep an eye on it.)
The clothesline is another of the patterns and habits that presuppose a stay-at-home homemaker. Maybe we can find ways to make it work anyway (there are always weekends, though in many households there are too many loads per week for that to be enough). But let's not denigrate other people's choices until we've shadowed them for a week and find out how things really work. Guessing doesn't help.
"clothing that smells like fresh air" --- Unless of course the air in the community is filled with smog and other particulate pollution... then your clothes just smell like crap.
I have hung my wash out to dry in the US cities and really good neighborhoods since the energy crisis of the 70's. I have always danced to a different drummer. I was probably the first in my neighborhood to use fluorescent bulbs, too. Oh gads, I hate the smell of dryer sheets.
We live in a city not far from Toronto, in a middle class established neigh borough, and we have been drying our clothes outside for more then 10 years during non-heating season, and in the basement during the heating season. (we do not need humidifier during the heating season)
We never had any complaints!
Nothing smells better than clothes fresh off the clothesline. Our dryer broke in February. Even though it would be an easy fix, we opted to leave it broken to force us to hang dry all our clothes instead of machine drying them (it was about half and half up to that point). It was one of the best decisions we made and won't go back.
Also, we didn't use fabric softener sheets before because they are chalk full of chemicals. Now, when I smell the strong scent of my neighbor's fabric softener coming out of their dryer vent, which is located right beside our driveway, it makes me feel ill and nauseous.
Actually, this article is from the paper I read this morning before I came in to work. Hey, Luckylefty... we (the writer and I) don't live in the U.S. You should remember that there are other places in the world besides its self-proclaimed centre.
Jacob, moving from a negative impact to a less negative impact is... wait for it... a positive impact. See, if you see the difference between -100 and -98, the difference is 2... that would be a positive number. This is symptomatic of something I've noticed about a lot of the people who post here; the constant wailing that comes out of a lot of the posters on this website seem more designed to stop people from doing anything out of a sense of futility, and that is a far more destructive tendency to encourage than almost anything else. To me, it sounds like shades of the evangelical belief in the imminence of the End Times/Rapture... since it's all going to hell, we don't need to do anything. This, however, fits in nicely with the United States' puritan cultural roots, and probably explains why USians get such a big charge out of doing it.
Annabelle, since when are root cellars ugly? In the neighbourhood I grew up in in the west end of Kingston, almost all of the houses were built with root cellars... and they were all built in the '70s. Not everywhere is like the self-proclaimed centre of the... well, you get the idea. Why on earth would you think root cellars are ugly?
As for outhouses, in fact municipal water treatment is a far more environmentally friendly (and public health friendly!) solution than an outhouse for every residence in a populous area like a city. Nothing like polluting all the area's groundwater with E. Coli to really bring out the long term nasties...
We might as well get used to knickers in the wind and tomatoes growing in the front yard. We might even get used to ugly little root cellars in the back yard and heaven forbid, hollyhocks growing around the outhouse. Great article!! Many more please...
Yes, but if I use a clothesline I can't use my "summber breeze" scented fabric softener. I'd have to settle for real summer breeze scent instead of that lovely chemical-wrought artificial scent.
Yaddy-yaddi-ya. When the value of those homes drops to $20k and the $$ is worth less and they get hungry, forget clotheslines, think candles in the dark and meals made from stolen food cooked on a fire (made from furniture) in the backyard. Then comes winter. Remember: This is America. Failure is its own judgment. There is no appeal.
Those who had no mercy shall have none.
Clotheslines... " What they do reveal is a household that cares enough about the environment to have a positive impact on it." Ms. Etherington apparently doesn't know the difference between having a "positive impact" and a (very slightly) less negative impact on the environment. Bourgeois self-congratulation for an infinitesimal slow-down in the rate of destruction is just another distraction from discussing the sort of radical transformation of society that could actually have a "positive impact" on the fate of the Earth.
Bravo for this article. We live in south Texas and clothes dry in 10 minutes. Not only is this good for the environment, but our clothes are fresher.