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Some more thoughts to add to yesterday’s post …

Washing clothes by hand in a bucket works great for me because I’ve got an outdoor clothesline and lots of sun. So much sun that laundry dries quickly even when it’s only wrung by hand, or (in the case of bedsheets) not wrung at all, but just hung on the line dripping wet. (I call that “free ironing” along with the drying!)

If I had to depend on an indoor clothesline/drying rack, my laundry setup would include a commercial-grade salad spinner to get as much water as possible out of the clothes. Commercial-grade salad spinners are readily available online. I’d go for the 5-gallon size.

And, if I had to do a lot of laundry (for example, if I had kids), I would add a “Rapid Washer” to my setup. Even with the low volume of laundry I do, I might still go ahead and get a Rapid Washer because they are very handy.

A Rapid Washer looks like a plunger, and the flared part can be made of metal or plastic. The handle is usually wooden. You use it to push soapy water through your clothes in a bucket or tub. Rapid Washers are available from antique dealers, from Lehmann’s, and from online marketplaces such as ebay and Amazon. People swear by them in terms of ability to get clothes clean.

Here’s a YouTube video by someone who uses a Rapid Washer and salad spinner to do his laundry.

That said, if you’re just not able/willing to wash by hand, and can’t afford a laundry service, washing machines these days are getting very water-efficient.

According to HomeWaterWorks, old-school washing machines use 40 to 45 gallons per load, whereas the new water-saving models use only 14 to 25 gallons per load, and get the clothes cleaner. The website offers tips on choosing a washer and using it efficiently. One new fact I picked up was that it’s always more water-efficient to do a full load, even if your washer has an adjustable load setting.

Other facts I learned from the HomeWaterWorks website: For the average household of four people in the USA, laundry accounts for 15% to 40% of total water usage. Also, the average USAmerican household does a staggering 400 loads of laundry a year! This fact seems to support a theory of mine, that people who have washers and dryers in their homes end up doing more laundry.

The typical four-person household with an old-school washing machine will use 12,000 gallons of water a year to do laundry, says HomeWaterWorks. That’s an awful lot of fresh potable water just to wash clothes.

Meanwhile, in Riot for Austerity land, a four-person household that has achieved 90% reduction in the water category will use about 14,400 gallons of water a year — TOTAL, for all uses.

Pretty remarkable huh.

Another laundry-related website, The Spruce, offers all sorts of useful information, including how to calculate laundry capacity and load size of a washer. I learned that a load of laundry weighs about 12 pounds. There’s a chart showing the weights of various laundry items. If you want to economize on laundry, one thing you can do is not have many pairs of denim jeans to wash, or bath towels. Each of those items weighs 1.6 pounds.

I quit using bath towels 25 years ago, while I was living in Tokyo. I noticed that the people at the public baths all seemed to get by with these tiny towels barely larger than a washcloth. I soon learned that they did the job fine, while offering the obvious attraction of being far easier to dry than a large bath towel. In Japan’s humid climate, it was a no-brainer. And I liked the small towels so much that I have stuck with them and never gone back to those giant thick bath towels.

Saves a lot of space in my wash-bucket. And on my clothesline!

Do you like the idea of not having to deal with the hassles of giant thick bath towels (which can be just as troublesome to dry in a dryer as they are on a clothesline), but don’t want to give up the convenience of being able to wrap yourself in a simple rectangular piece of fabric when you step out of the shower, instead of having to put on clothes right away? Get yourself a sarong! These giant body wraps can be as big as, or even bigger than, a large bath towel (both of the ones I own are over 3 feet wide and almost 6 feet long), but are made of nice thin quick-dry fabric so you get the best of both worlds.

And as a bonus (at least for those of us living in tropical and semi-tropical climates), you can wear the sarong as a skirt or dress and let it air-dry while you wear it. Ah, convenient bliss!

Got any tales of laundry success, failure, interesting experiments to share? Drop me a line!

Have you ever calculated your daily water usage? Following is my estimated daily average water consumption in the various categories:

Drinking: 1 gal

Cooking: 0 – 1 gal

Washing dishes: 1 gal

Washing clothes (in a bucket): 1 – 2 gal

Washing body: 1 – 2 gal

Toilet flushing: 2 – 5 gal (the use of Earth’s precious supply of potable water to “do our business” always galls me, and I long for the widespread legalization of compost toilets! In the meantime, “If it’s yellow let it mellow” is a household phrase for many people I know.)

Watering fruit & veggie plants: 2 gal*

Total: 8 to 14 gal/day

The Riot for Austerity target is 10 gallons per person per day, which is 10% of the U.S. average of 100 gallons per person per day.

Outdoor water usage (watering lawns, washing cars etc) accounts for 30 to 60 percent of a household’s total water consumption. Other low-hanging fruit is showers and laundry. But you can reduce a huge chunk just by having a yard full of plants that are either native, or well-adapted to your local rainfall conditions.

Showers: I’m fortunate to live at the beach, and I generally keep clean just by going in the ocean regularly. (There are quite a few of us saltwater cleanliness aficionadoes!) But when I want a freshwater shower, I dump rainwater or wellwater on myself a cup at a time (in my outdoor “shower stall” made of vines and fence). It’s surprising how far a gallon or two can go. Very refreshing on a hot day, and surprisingly tolerable even on a cool day (this is Florida after all).

All sink water and laundry-water gets collected and poured in the yard, to water non-edible trees & shrubs. (I use mild soaps in very dilute form which the plants can tolerate.) Same with toothbrush rinse water.

What are some of your favorite tips for household water conservation? If 10 gallons a day doesn’t sound do-able, take it in pieces. And you really might be surprised how little you can get by with, once you start monitoring it and making a bit of a game of it. If nothing else, you can do it as a household disaster-preparedness activity. Acquiring extreme water conservation know-how is a great way not only to increase your household’s resilience, but also to become a resource for your community.

* In the Riot for Austerity community, a lot of people don’t count fruit & veggie plants in their water consumption total. The reasoning is that when we buy produce at the market, water consumption is part of the footprint of that food. When we grow food at home, water consumption is part of that food’s footprint.

Many Riot folks also don’t include rainwater or wellwater consumption (if applicable) in their total. I myself prefer to measure my use of these onsite sources and include them in my consumption total because I want to keep close track of how much water I’m using and how far I can stretch every drop!

In this age of social media, trying to reach people and have an impact can feel like a lost cause. How ironic that it would feel this way! Here we have all these apps and all these different channels, which give everyday people the potential to reach more viewers/listeners than ever.

The potential. I guess that’s where the “lost cause” feeling comes in. In an age of rockstar bloggers who get a million Likes and are constantly being jetted around the world to give speeches and endorse products, and are making a huge impact, a blogger who only reaches five or seven people (or one person, or sometimes zero) is pretty much a failure, don’t you agree?

But wait! That’s a trick question. First of all: Nobody reaches zero people. There’s no such thing. We all end up reaching at least one other person. It may not happen instantly but pretty much everything we do has some kind of impact.

And second of all, as wonderful as online channels are, good old low-tech communication has not lost its power. Back in the days when my job was to promote permaculture design courses in Austin, and I had beaten the online channels to death, sometimes I’d go out on foot and tack flyers to utility poles! (And if I didn’t have even a few bucks to make copies, which sometimes I did not) I would individually hand-draw the flyers. Yes it was time-consuming, but my time was not worth much in monetary terms, and anyway I like to draw. Well, what do you know, those utility-pole flyers ended up bringing in quite a few students!

Third of all, and perhaps most important: Sometimes all it takes to make a crucial difference is for one person to reach one other person!

One night some years back, a disillusioned environmentalist of my acquaintance suddenly had his hope rekindled, by stumbling on the permaculture design movement. He heard about permaculture serendipitously: He happened to be listening to some obscure late-night radio show while he was working aboard a commercial fishing boat. Actually I don’t know that it was at night; it could just as well have been in the daytime. But the lonely late-night airwaves is how I always picture it: sketchy reception; one voice traveling out over the choppy dark sea, reaching into the ears of a person who just happened to be fertile ground for the ideas being presented.

Maybe the radio show reached many other people; maybe it reached only that one guy. What I do know is that the one person I know who did hear that radio show has ended up sharing permaculture design knowledge with probably thousands of other people.

A one-to-one transmission can feel flimsy, particularly in this day and age of so many channels and such wide reach. But that “one” can be all it takes to sprout many thousands of seeds.

I mention this because I know a lot of you are working hard to make a difference in the world and in your communities. Don’t get derailed by someone else’s stellar numbers. Be happy for that person, be grateful to them for doing their part, and bring your attention back to your own piece of the work.

You might find it helpful to recall examples of how the “Power of One” has influenced the course of your own life. Think of one person who reached you and made a huge impact. (Don’t limit yourself to people you’ve met in person or heard “live.” Some of my strongest influences have been books or songs or paintings from hundreds of years ago!)

The above advice is for myself also, as I venture down intricate and obscure pathways where I may reach only one other person, and maybe not in this lifetime. No matter! Here I go, here we all go.

There are many approaches to tackling the overall task of footprint reduction. Here are some approaches I’ve found to be effective and personally beneficial:

— Riot for Austerity (90% Reduction Challenge): Set out to cut your footprint to 10% of the U.S. average in as many areas as possible (water consumption, electricity usage, gasoline, food footprint etc.)

— Journey to Zero Waste: Strive for zero waste (or as close to zero as possible) in various areas such as water usage, product packaging, etc.

— Tackle categories that are “big” for you personally. Travel might be a big area for one person; food or home energy usage could be big for another.

For wine lovers (like me!), a good example of the third approach is this article in the New York Times which brings up good questions to ask in determining the footprint of wine.

“Do producers plow or till the rows between the vines, which releases carbon to the atmosphere? Or do they plant and maintain a cover crop, whether grasses, legumes or something else? An organic or biodynamic grower could do either. But maintaining a cover crop creates a lower carbon footprint.

Do they mow the cover crop? Or simply roll it? Rolling it releases less carbon from the soil.

“Using organic compost is good for vineyards. But do producers make it themselves? Or do they buy it and ship it, possibly from a distance?

“Do they use electric or hybrid vehicles? Or standard combustion engines?

“Are they practicing regenerative agriculture by minimizing use of chemical sprays and acting to promote biodiversity and soil life?

“Have they converted to renewable fuels? Do they practice carbon sequestration, in which carbon is captured and stored rather than released into the atmosphere? 

“Where does their electricity come from? How do they manage their use of water?”

Excellent questions all! If you aren’t sure of the answers, or can’t find them out, there are other things you can do. One is to choose wine that comes in lighter-weight bottles. (According to the article, over the past 20 years heavy bottles have been used as a marketing ploy, to create the perception of better wine.) You could also try making your own wine from local fruit in season.

We can choose to ask similarly probing questions about any product we consume, service we use, etc. Just take care not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. As a fellow member of the Journey to Zero Waste group (Facebook group) says, “We don’t need a few people doing zero-waste perfectly. We need millions of us doing it imperfectly.”

A local grassroots eco organization in my area has launched a massive campaign to reduce use of single-use plastics, and to clean up the plastics that are already out there littering the land and floating in our waterways.

I’m at their event “Go Drastic on Plastic,” where various experts are reporting grim statistics and showing photos of injured marine animals.

Just a few things I’ve learned today:

Some huge volume, x hundred billion tons, of plastics have been produced since the invention of plastics in 1907. Only 9% of the total has been recycled.

Single-use plastics account for 50% of the total volume we consume.

500 million plastic straws are used in the USA each day (that is more than our population!)

In the past 10 years, we’ve used more plastics than in the previous 100 years.

Those are just a few of the figures that stood out.

It’s good that people are getting more aware and are working on various fronts to address the problem.

The eco organization I mentioned is called Dream Green Volusia, in case you are located in my geographic region and/or want to see what they are up to, to get ideas for what you can do in your area. You can find Dream Green Volusia on Facebook.

On an individual level, you can make more of a difference than you might think. I’ve been continually surprised at the number of friends/neighbors who told me they were influenced by seeing me bring reusable bags, reusable water bottle, and so on.

The plastic trash problem, along with other grave problems such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity, are actually symptoms of a much larger overall problem: humankind’s disconnect from nature. As we address the root issue, we’ll be addressing the symptoms too. Still, the symptoms are sufficiently severe at this point that we need to treat them as problems in their own right.

Don’t give in to discouragement though. Do what you can on a personal level, and join forces with any likeminded people you can find.

One of the projects on my “back burner” is to write a book called Constructive Laziness: How To Save the Environment and Vastly Improve Your Life By Doing Absolutely Nothing Whatsoever. I’d like to say the reason I haven’t written the book yet is that I’ve been busy doing nothing, but actually, it’s just that I’m working on other books and projects.

That said, I may be one of the top five working people I’ve ever met in my life who manage to spend a significant percentage of their time doing nothing. I actually build it into my day. This is not a skill I was born with, and if I can learn it anyone can.

I grew up in a family that did a lot of camping and travel. We had many adventures together. One fine morning at a campsite, we were discussing options for what to do that day. Hiking, scenic drive, that sort of thing. That’s when I came up with the suggestion, “Can we just sit around and camp?” By which I meant, savor the experience of just being there. We probably ended up picking a more active option (I don’t remember), but that attitude has stayed with me my whole life. Whether at home or on the road, I like to just sit around and camp. Look up at the trees. Notice things in the street. Let thoughts flow through my head. Enjoy sitting at the table I’m sitting at, drinking from the cup I’m drinking from. Watching clouds.

There is zero goal other than just appreciating my life and the world. But I end up getting great benefits. Obviously it’s a great way to recharge. But also, a lot of creative ideas pop into my head. (At which point I usually grab a notebook or my cellphone and write them down, thus interrupting my “do nothing” time — but only for a couple of minutes.)

A popular quote from Bill Mollison (who founded the permaculture design movement with David Holmgren around 1980) is, “When in doubt, do nothing.” In the context of permaculture, this means don’t intrude/intervene until you’ve spent ample time observing a site or situation. And even if/when you do decide to do something, make the minimum necessary intervention.

It would probably help the environment quite a bit if everyone who longed to spend at least a few minutes a day doing nothing, were to make a point of doing so. Toward that end, I’ve gathered some articles to provide moral support to those of you who have aspirations of doing nothing but are not sure where to start.

Further Reading:

Treehugger.com: Why you should join the ‘do nothing’ club: “The Italians called it ‘il dolce far niente’, literally translated as ‘sweet doing nothing,’ or more colloquially as ‘pleasant idleness’. It has a strong positive connotation because it’s seen as valuable, even necessary to wellbeing.”

Forbes.com: The Importance of Doing Nothing: “If we don’t allow ourselves periods of uninterrupted, freely associated thought then personal growth, insight and creativity are less likely to emerge.”

(A book I haven’t read that sounds good) How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell. “Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. Once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.”

And on a somewhat related note, from one of my favorite writers/thinkers, David at Raptitude.com, Go Deeper, Not Wider: “I keep imagining a tradition I’d like to invent. After you’re established in your career, and you have some neat stuff in your house, you take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new or acquire any new possessions you don’t need. … You improve skills rather than learning new ones. You consume media you’ve already stockpiled instead of acquiring more. You read your unread books, or even reread your favorites. You pick up the guitar again and get better at it, instead of taking up the harmonica. …”