Fighting to dry clothes outside - for the environment's sake

AURORA, Ontario: Rob and Laurie Cook are not prone to breaking the law, but these days they have been given to a regular act of civil disobedience: hanging their laundry to dry out in the backyard. The deed to their home - like most in this upscale suburb - prohibits outdoor clotheslines as eyesores.

"I thought people passing by couldn't see it, and the developers wouldn't see it, so it didn't bother my conscience too much," said Cook, a retired businessman and former officer in the Canadian Air Force who is part of a citizens group trying to get the clothesline ban overturned, arguing that line drying is better for the environment.

"Using a dryer may have made sense 30 years ago when energy was cheap and we weren't aware of global warming," he said. "It doesn't any more."

The Cooks are part of a loose global network of people who are rallying around what they call the "right to dry." While not necessarily abandoning the electric dryer, they are adding the clothesline and the drying rack to their stable of household appliances, or fighting for the right to do so.

Ontario is among a number of places that are considering striking down the clothesline bans that have been common in North America and parts of Europe, arguing that they are environmentally irresponsible. Laws seeking to overturn clothesline bans are now pending in Connecticut, Vermont and Colorado.

"If we can't change simple stuff like this, we'll never handle the big things we need to do for the planet," said Aurora's mayor, Phyllis Morris, who this year petitioned Ontario's government to declare clothesline bans an illegal "barrier to conservation" under provincial law. "People say, 'Oh, Phyllis, you want to turn women back into the laundry lady,' and I say: Wrong. This is about rights. It's about the environment."

Motivated by environmental concerns and skyrocketing energy costs, consumers like her and the Cooks are re-evaluating their drying habits. The British retailer ASDA said that in the first four months of 2007, the most recent period for which numbers were available, sales of clotheslines and washing lines rose 150 percent and sales of clothespins more than 1,000 percent. Hills Industries of Australia, whose core product is drying racks, reported that revenues in its home division jumped 15 percent in 2007.

Tumble dryers, like sport utility vehicles, are verging on an image problem: Once symbols of economic success, they have morphed into icons of environmental disregard. The gas guzzlers of household appliances, electric dryers use about as much energy as a refrigerator - consuming more than 6 percent of household energy - even though they are used only intermittently.

And there is a cheap and easy, carbon-free alternative. "A clothesline is not a solar panel or a Prius - its something that everyone can afford," said Alexander Lee, founder of Project Laundry List, which promotes sustainable technology in the home.

None of this means the tumble dryer is dead. Over the past three decades, it has become a fixture of domestic life in the developed world. As of 2005, they were in more than 50 percent of households in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and Britain.

Even in the Netherlands, known as environmentally conscious, the number of dryers has been doubling every 10 years. The only country to have withstood the trend is Italy, where laundry hangs from balconies, even in cities.

But conservation experts say that to avert a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels, global emissions must be cut 80 percent by 2050. To reach that goal, they say, household emissions, which make up a quarter of the total in developed countries, will have to take a big hit. At least a third of the carbon savings in the residential sector comes from behavioral changes, according to a recent study by the Environmental Change Institute of Oxford University.

Dryers, which must heat air and spin clothes around, cannot be made much more efficient, or at least no one has figured out how to do it yet. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's energy star system, intended to direct consumers to more efficient models, does not rate dryers because they all use "similar" amounts of energy. In fact, for more energy-efficient clothes drying, it recommends choosing a model that detects when clothes are dry and shuts off, or "air drying clothes on clotheslines or clothes racks."

Appliance manufacturers say they are "continually looking for ways to improve efficiency," with sensors and the like, said Allison Eckelkamp, public relations manager for General Electric's consumer division.

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