The Right to Dry: Line Drying and Sustainable Development

In much of the world a clothesline isn't a social statement, it's life: from Algeria to Germany to Zambia billions of the world's people use yards of twine or rope and a bit of sunshine to dry their freshly laundered clothes. This isn't simply a warm weather habit either, freeze-drying clothes isn't uncommon (it just takes longer).

Some of these people line dry clothes because they lack access to a dryer, others prefer the smell of line dried clothes, others out of habit, while still others line dry because it's one small step towards living a greener lifestyle. Clothing dryers, according to a 2007 Time Magazine article, comprises 6% of a US household's electricity use each year, releasing in the process up to one ton of CO2 per year. With roughly 80% of the 103 million US households possessing clothing dryers, in contrast to a mere 4% of households in Italy, it's no wonder why many feel that by hanging their clothes to dry they can take one step forward in helping to mitigate climate change.



Yet, despite the fact that line drying clothes reduces energy use while also extending the life of clothes, while electric dryers are the second largest household consumer of electricity after the refrigerator and the leading cause of house fires among appliances, line drying clothes remain something of an anomaly in the United States.

Some of this is habit - culturally we've gotten used to having dryers. Some of this is by design, in Denmark, for example newly constructed student housing includes space for indoor drying points out Alexander P. Lee executive director of Project Laundry List, an organization dedicated to getting Americans line drying clothing again, in a 2009 New York Times piece. In the United States, by contrast, nearly 60 million Americans live in communities where line drying clothes outdoors is not simply difficult - it's impossible. Community associations have banned the practice, deeming line drying clothing aesthetically unpleasing.

How can a practice which reduces energy use and the amount of chemicals necessary to get clothes clean (sunlight is a natural disinfectant) be deemed aesthetically undesirable, and then outlawed, when by contrast nobody seems to have a problem with the toxic soup that is Vinyl Siding and chemical lawn care? As environmental research analyst Chelsea Hodge stated in the New York Times Piece," If 95 percent of Italians, some of earth's most fashion-conscious inhabitants, don't own a dryer, then why are Americans so adamant about tumble drying their clothes?"

States have started to fight back with legislators in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont passing laws which prohibit anti-clothesline rules (pause for a moment to ponder that we needed to pass a law to prohibit a rule that prohibits a behavior), but there's still a large gap between making line drying possible to making it probable. Millions of Americans are still as attached to their clothes dryers as they are to their cars.