[Greenbuilding] drying clothes

[Steven Tjiang]

Yeah...yeah.  This is all nice and true but the reality is that the real
reason why many people in HK, Europe, Mexico city don't have dryers and do
laundry.....is because energy costs are high relative to their incomes. Land
and space is expensive too.  Give them cheap energy and almost all of those
people w/o dryers will buy one.  Really posh people who can afford dryers
have maids to do laundry in China so they don't really care if there is a
dryer or not. People are not that different.  Let's get to the root reason:
low energy costs that don't internalize the environmental damage of energy
use.

A case in point: High gas prices did more to decrease SUV sales than all the
pissing-and-moaning about mileage standards and holier-than-thou attitudes
toward low-brow-ness of SUV drivers.  I see the dryer thing going in the
same direction here.

By all means, set a good example and I do my part in that respect but I
don't really expect the general public to do so.

---- Steve (KZ6LSD)


On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Reuben Deumling <9watts at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 8:04 AM, Racheli Gai <racheli at sonoracohousing.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> But it's also important not to assume that arguing against the use of
>> dryers necessarily means that people are claiming "moral superiority".
>>
> Racheli, well said!
>
> The problem I'm concerned with is that energy-efficiency-as-policy suggests
> that we can skip this conversation altogether, as long as we're buying
> energy efficient products.
>
> I don't know if not having a dryer is morally superior or not. I'll leave
> that for future generations to determine.  If one has (gotten used to using)
> a clothes dryer, figuring out what steps to take to get by without a machine
> to dry one's laundry, though, seems like a prudent direction in which to
> move, all things considered.
>
> Saying 'I/we/people I know who live on the fifteenth floor of a posh
> building in Hong Kong dry my/our/their clothes clothes without a machine'
> can also, I think, be appreciated as opening up a space for others who may
> rely on a clothes dryer to consider this as a possibility. The assumption
> that this statement is necessarily made within a moral framework, by which I
> think some people mean 'I am being lectured at and I resent that,' may
> reflect as much or more about the hearer than the speaker.
>
> As for apartments or living in cities, people dry their clothes the world
> over under those circumstances--without machines. Mexico City, Sao Paolo,
> Bangkok, Hong Kong, London... I don't know the distribution of clothes
> dryers in those particular cities but believe that (a) on average the
> available space is if anything lower per capita there than what many of us
> who live in US cities are used to, and (b) they also do *much* less laundry
> than some of us have gotten used to doing.
>
> The challenge as I see it is to identify or re-discover practical, cheap
> (vernacular) ways of accomplishing our domestic routines with fewer
> (eventually no) fossil fuels. As Amory Lovins said thirty five years ago:
> "A society cannot aspire to be both conspicuously consumptive and elegantly
> frugal. The hard and soft paths are culturally and institutionally
> antagonistic, and furthermore, compete for the same limited resources."  The
> Energy Controversy: Soft Path Questions & Answers p. 5
>
> Reuben Deumling
>
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