This post about eco friendly laundry is sponsored by EC30. Thank you for supporting the brands that support this blog!
If you’re new around here, let me be the first to tell you that one of my very first blog posts was about laundry. LOL. Not the most interesting topic in the world to write about, but it’s functional.
If you’re like me, you care about more than just clean laundry. It’s also important to make sure that your cleaning and laundry methods are kind to the environment. I thought I’d compile a few ways to reduce your carbon footprint while doing laundry with a few eco-friendly laundry tips.
Wash with cold water
Not only will you save money on your energy bills, but most detergents are able to work well using cold water. I’ve been washing our clothes with cold water for years and have never looked back.
As a plus, your clothes will stay looking newer for longer when you wash with cold water.
Use eco-friendly laundry detergent
With traditional laundry detergent, you’re paying for diluted cleaning solutions and, once you’re done with their plastic containers, you toss them in the recycle bin (in hopes that they’re recycled), and proceed to buy yet another plastic container with cleaning solution.
Consider the laundry detergent swatches by EC30. They have all the detergent you need to wash your clothes spun into a cloth-like swatch that dissolves with the water in your washing machine. Your clothes are left clean and fragrant!
By switching to a laundry detergent that’s eco-friendly, you can reduce C02 emission by 50% vs traditional liquids. Even more, EC30 then offsets what they can’t reduce by supporting natural climate solutions through their partner the Arbor Day Foundation. So your laundry can be on a Journey to Carbon Neutral!
Pay attention to how much laundry detergent you use
Too much detergent is not only wasteful, but it reduces your machine’s efficiency and can lead to excess water usage to get rid of the foamy suds.
I’ve accidentally used too much laundry detergent in the past, and my machine always got stuck with a “suds” error message. By reducing the amount of detergent I added, I stopped seeing the machine full of suds.
If you’re using EC30’s laundry swatches, make sure you use only one swatch if it’s a smaller load. These swatches pack a punch!
Wash full loads
Save water and energy by running a full load. Even front-loading machines (the most energy efficient ones) use an average of 14 gallons of water per load, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That’s still a ton of water!
So, opt to do laundry once a week, and gather as many clothes as possible into each load. We go through a LOT of dirty laundry per week with only two of us, and I usually have four loads of laundry to do:
- towels
- bedding
- whites and light colors
- darks
A typical load of towels in our household of two adults will have around 4-5 bath towels, 3-4 shower cloths, 3 kitchen counter cloths, and 1-2 sink reusable sponges. That’s quite a lot!
Use wool dryer balls
Wool dryer balls naturally separate clothes in the dryer, so it increases air flow between the clothes. Increased air flow means faster drying. The less time your dryer needs to run, the less you pay on your electric bills.
Plus, you can customize how your clothes smell by adding a few drops of essential oils to the wool dryer balls. That’s an eco-friendly laundry win-win!
Time loads so the dryer stays hot
Make sure you do loads back to back so that you can use the dryer’s residual heat from the previous load to help start drying the new load.
For example, I always wash our towels FIRST, since they’ll need a higher temperature to dry. Immediately after the towels are ready to be removed from the dryer, I add in our freshly-washed bed linens. This way, the dryer doesn’t have to heat up a second time, and we use the residual heat from drying the towels to help dry our bed linens.
Quickly removing laundry while it’s warm also helps reduce wrinkles. Say goodbye to your steamer and iron!
Wear clothes more than once
I usually wear clothes more than once, especially if they’re pants. By reusing your lightly-used clothes, you accumulate less dirty laundry at the end of the week. This makes a huge difference if you have a large family.
Almost everyone has a chair somewhere in their house that’s used to put on briefly worn clothing. Utilize a chair or ottoman to lay clothes that were briefly worn so you don’t add them back to a wardrobe (or drawer) full of clean clothes.
Or, if you’re fancy, you can use a standalone wardrobe rack to allow the clothes to air out before reusing.
I wanna know, how many of these eco friendly laundry tips were you already following?
Be sure to grab EC30’s eco-friendly laundry detergent! Not only do they leave your laundry smelling and looking clean, they don’t contain water, making the shipment produce less greenhouse gas emissions! Click to find out more about EC30 and their journey to carbon neutral.
