Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 42

As an artificial skin for humans, clothes get dirty. They capture spills from the cafeteria, effluents at the party, dirt from the floor, stains from the grass, and the smell of sweat. So students occasionally need to take their clothes to the laundry, where fossil fuels power machines that use chemicals to clean them. Like other consuming routines, doing the laundry is a form of ordinary consumption that we’re so used to, and bored by, that we can’t see the tangle of cultural assumptions spinning in the washer. We hardly ever think of ourselves as consumers in the Laundromat or the laundry room, but a significant amount of American consumption, especially energy consumption, comes from precisely such normal and unnoticed routines—forms of the inconspicuous consumption that is structured into our lives. Once again, as in the bathroom, our cleanliness dirties the planet.²²

In the past twenty years, spurred in part by federal regulations and Energy Star standards, manufacturers have made washers and dryers a lot more efficient, but a dryer will never be as efficient as a clothesline. The clothesline was an old-fashioned technology that used solar power to dry clothes. People used implements called clothespins to attach clothes to a rope strung between two poles. On a good day, the clothes dried quickly and picked up the fresh smell of outdoor air (which is now synthesized in the scents of detergents and fabric softeners). On rainy days—or in winter, in cold climates—an outdoor clothesline was useless, so people rigged lines indoors. Still, for reasons of predictability, profit, and progress, consumers became convinced that clotheslines were “old-fashioned,” and quickly opted for the mechanization of the drying process. American colleges followed suit, providing students with the appliances they had learned to expect at home.²³

A 2006 French study examined the life-cycle costs of a single pair of jeans, and found that washing, drying, and ironing accounts for 47 percent of their environmental impact, using about 240 kilowatt hours of electricity a year—equal to the energy used to power four thousand sixty-watt light bulbs for an hour.²⁴

Thankfully, reducing resource consumption in college laundry rooms is no harder than changing habits of body and mind. Practically speaking, colleges and universities could buy or lease the most efficient washers and dryers, and complement them with clotheslines and drying racks. Culturally, students could also begin to change their expectations. Students like Joe and Jo College have grown up with a rising tide of TV commercials for whiter, brighter, cleaner clothes, but they could choose to remember that cleanliness wasn’t always next to godliness until members of the Cleanliness Institute—funded by Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Armour & Company, and Unilever—realized that, as association executive Roscoe Edlund said in 1930, “The business of cleanliness is big business,” and that cleanliness was a great way to sell soaps and detergents. Students could resist this brainwashing by washing clothes—especially outerwear—less than current cultural expectations demand. They could embrace the smell test, as well as the sweet smell of clothes dried in fresh air. Less laundry, too, would extend the life span of clothes—agitation and tumbling result not only in clean, dry garments but also in lint, the common name for the fluff that used to be clothes. In short, saving rivers of water, acres of cotton, and pounds of chemicals is as simple as asking one question at the end of the day: “How dirty are these jeans?”²⁵