Green rebels fight for the right to dry

Published on Saturday 19 April 2008 19:43

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 in the garden.

The deed to their home, like most in their upmarket 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.

He 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 anymore."

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 considering striking down the clothesline bans that have been common in North America, arguing they are environmentally irresponsible. Laws seeking to overturn the bans are 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 earlier 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.'"

Asda said that in the first four months of 2007, the most recent period for which numbers were available, sales of clotheslines rose 150% in Britain and sales of clothes pegs rose more than 1,000%.

Hills Industries of Australia, whose core products are drying racks, reported that revenues in its home division jumped 15% in 2007. Tumble dryers, like 4x4s, are developing an image problem: once symbols of economic success, they have morphed into icons of environmental disregard.

The gas guzzlers of household appliances, electric tumble dryers use about as much energy as a fridge – consuming more than 6% 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 – it's 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 30 years it has become a fixture of domestic life in the developed world.

As of 2005, they were in more than 50% of households in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium and Britain.

Even in the Netherlands, which has a reputation for being 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 3.6F above pre-industrial levels, global emissions must be cut by 80% 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 cut.

At least a third of the carbon savings in the residential sector comes from behavioural changes, according to a recent study by the Environmental Change Institute of Oxford University.