Tip #75 Reduce how frequently you wash your clothes

It's well known that the fashion industry has a huge ecological footprint. And often we look only at the production of our clothes. But rarely you look at the whole life cycle of a piece of clothing. Then we would find out that everyday washing and drying damage our natural environment the most.

A recent study of Chesty Bonds shows up to 80% of their energy consumption happens during customer use. With Levi Jeans, nearly 60% of the environmental impacts come from washing (source). So we should start taking care of the clothing in a more environmentally friendly way.

Did you know that The average family does as many as eight loads of laundry every week, requiring a good deal of energy and thousands of gallons of water?

Break the habit
Inspect Before Tossing. Before you mindlessly toss your clothes into the laundry basket at the end of the day, consider if they are truly soiled or not. Items like underwear and undershirts or exercise clothing will certainly need more washing than, say, a sweatshirt or jeans that have been layered or otherwise kept out of dirt's way. Many of the clothes currently in our laundry baskets are — for all intents and purposes — clean.

Use Cold Water
Selecting cold water in a wash cycle saves energy. This has other benefits for clothing, such as retaining colour fastness (a material's colour resistance to fading or running) and reducing shrinkage - both of which lead to longer-lasting garments and therefore means there is less of a need for new garments!