Washing machine

When Tyson's sister moved overseas earlier this year, she gave us her washing machine. 

Our previous machine was my first ever white goods purchase, to serve a student house share, and at the time it was relatively water and energy efficient. More than ten years later it was valiantly continuing to serve, but was no longer the most efficient option available - and getting a bit small for a family. (How do such little people make such large piles of washing?!)

In addition to using a more efficient machine, we are also using its multiple function buttons to override its less efficient features. We continue to choose cold water every time, and only run the machine if it is full. We also now have control of the spin speed, and (except on very wet winter days) reduce it from the preset 1000rpm to the minimum 600rpm. It is also possible to end the wash completely before the spin cycle is complete, and I do this when I walk past during the spin.

Initial Time: an hour or two relocating the machine 30km across the suburbs and reinstalling.

Initial Cost: zero (big thanks to Auntie L!)

Ongoing time or cost commitment: Clothes takes a little longer to dry if not spun fiercely for the full cycle - but for at least six months of the year (more like nine) they still dry in a day on the outside clothesline in the sun. In wet months I keep the long spin for nappies and heavy items, but short/600rpm spin for other things.

Impact: The advertised energy and water 'stats' of the new machine - an Electrolux EWF10831 - are about the same as the old (310kWhr/yr warm; 130kWhr/yr cold; 68L per wash).

However, the new machine can take 8kg, rather than 5.5kg. This means that the total number of loads is reduced from 5-7 a week to 3-5 a week, and this is where the big saving comes: the machine is using the same amount of energy to wash 45% more washing. Energy ratings are calculated assuming one wash load per day. If we do four loads a week, we use around 177kWhr/yr. If we do six loads a week, we do around 265kWhr/yr. So, we are potentially saving 188kWhr per year, a reduction of 154kg of carbon dioxide. (That's without any alteration to the spin cycle - we could not figure a way to calculate that)

Our observation is that the new machine uses about 60% as much water per wash. We catch the water, so can make a pretty good guess at this. Previously we used around 85L per wash; now we are using around 50L. Allowing for the reduced number of loads, that's a reduction of around 16,000L per year.

Before you race out and replace your washing machine, however, its worth considering the embodied energy involved: the energy (and water) used to manufacture and transport the machine, including the raw materials used to make the machine. In addition to the obvious plastic and steel, washing machines use copper, silver, gold, palladium and platinum. Although mostly used in small quantities in the machine's electronics, extraction of these metals is considered to have high environmental impacts. Even spread over a ten-year working life, the embodied energy in the production of a washing machine has been estimated at around 16% of its total environmental impact, with its disposal after use another 10%. That is, only three-quarters of the 'footprint' of a washing machine is the energy it uses to wash for ten years - the rest is its manufacture and disposal. Another website suggests a twenty-year life span (optimistic!) and has the embodied energy calculated as 5,681,430,000 Joules (1,578kWhr).

Which leads me to: We have a fully functioning 5.5kg front-loader washing machine to give away. If you or someone you know is setting up house or still needing to transition away from a top-loader, and could help spread the embodied footprint of the old machine over a few more working years, please get in touch.

Update: We gave the old machine away using 'GiveIt' and it is now heading for a family in need.

What to do when the hottest week on record is forecast for your city

When the forecast showed Christmas day as the first in a run of seven days close to 40°C, Perth's hottest week on record, we knew it would test our commitment to sustainable living to its edges. The temptation was to pour water on the garden, crank the airconditioner and stay inside (possibly in front of some energy-consuming electronic entertainment). Here are a few things we did to ride out the week of heat without maximising our environmental footprint.

- Wore wet flannels to feel cooler. When I lived in an uninsulated unairconditioned fibro house I used to freeze wet tea towels in a U-shape and wear them around my neck. Now if I am reaching that point I consider we are past the 'bearable' test and its time to turn on the aircon.

- Sent Eva to bed with a squashy ice pack.

- Breastfed baby twice as often... as if the heat wasn't making me tired enough already!

- Kept the fridge as full as possible, filling empty spaces with blocks of ice or cold water, to improve thermal mass by reducing the amount of air to be kept cool. Air is hard to keep cool because it escapes whenever the fridge or freezer door is opened. 

- Shaded everything! In addition to the summer-long emplacements we added some temporary foam rubber mats along the kitchen & rear toilet windows and a tarpaulin over the clothesline. The foam rubber mats make a huge difference. The glass inside was noticeably cooler behind the mats, even before the sun was on the window, and even the cranky thermometer registered about 4 degrees difference between the covered and uncovered glass.

- Washed every day to ensure there was enough grey water for the garden. We always run the washing machine with a full load, so I worked my way through 'sometimes' items (towels, sheets, bathmats etc) to ensure the garden got water every day without having to give it pure drinking water from the tap. On a couple of the hottest days I did two loads and gave the lawn a good soak.

- Played outside in the mornings for as long as possible (for exercise, fresh air and to prevent against cabin fever). Did quiet indoor activities through the worst of the heat (lego, trains, playdough, craft, hide & seek, tea-sets, dolls & teddies, etc). Read a lot of books.

- Had cold or nearly cold showers, cool baths, and used the paddle pool sparingly (and put the water onto the garden when shower/ bath/ play was over).

- Were disciplined about the water-catching bowl in the kitchen sink, and got it out onto the courtyard pots any time it was full to help the plants through the worst of the heat.

- Ran fans rather than the airconditioner for as long as this was bearable. We turned on the aircon on four of the seven hot days - on three of those days for only about three hours. On day three, when we used it first, we set it at 28°C. On day five, when it came on again, the walls of our house had soaked up more heat and we dropped the aircon to 26°C. This is easily enough to cool our living spaces. (Due to the location of the air conditioner unit, even running it like a fridge would not really cool our bedrooms).

- At night, opened the house up to cool as much as possible before morning. We ran the extractor fans to help remove the day's heat and placed pedestal fans in the eastern windows (the overnight direction of cool air if any is coming) to help draw in the breeze.

- Didn't cook (or barely cooked). Christmas leftovers helped with this. We also reheated some frozen meals in the microwave. When we used the toastie maker we then put it outside to cool, so that its heat was not added to the inside temperature. We definitely did not turn on the oven, and only used the stove for about an hour in total all week.

- Went out to places that were cooler (eg the beach, the shady playground beside the lake) or where airconditioning would already be running for other people (Tyson's work, grandparents' house, public facilities). This is not about letting others carry our footprint, but about maximising the number of people each aircon serves, thereby minimising the total number of airconditioners running. On New Year's Eve it was our turn to run the airconditioner on behalf of a group of families. We ran it for 13 hours, but for much of that time had members of up to seven other households sharing it with us.

- Did not increase screen time. We don't have a TV at all. Tyson & I watch a little I-view but Eva is allowed only a very occasional episode of Playschool under extreme circumstances (like the week she was stuck home with hand foot & mouth disease recently). Although I had Playschool in mind as an 'if all else fails' emergency activity for the heat we didn't need to go there - perhaps because the room with the computer is not the coolest room in the house.

Despite being over 42°C on New Year's Eve, with the road still hot under our bare feet at midnight as we watched fireworks in 30°C heat with no breeze, not all the predicted maximums were reached. The average maximum temperature of 39.4°C made it only the hottest week in 34 years, the third hottest week in 116 years of records, and the hottest December week on record, NOT the hottest week ever. Lucky us, eh?! Even though it was only below 25°C for a handful of hours all week, in some early mornings, and didn't get below 20°C at all...

None of these actions had any initial cost, and time commitments were very small (a matter of a few minutes here and there).  

The impact is difficult to measure in any precise manner. Certainly if we had not used passive cooling measures we would have run the airconditioner a lot more in the past week. Its hard to say exactly how much energy this would have meant, as it depends on things like the temperature outside, the temperature the aircon is set to, and how much we would actually have turned it on, but the aircon uses (roughly) between 1.5 and 2kWh (units of energy) per hour. Perhaps as much as 100kWh was saved by limiting our aircon use. If we had run it 24-7 for the week it could have used between 252 and 336 kWh in total.

More importantly, we did not significantly increase our demand for power through a peak period of demand. Demand in peak periods wastes energy all year, as the whole system needs to be built for extremes rather than averages. Minimising peak usage has more impact than minimising average usage. 

I'm quite pleased with how well we did. One more day and I think I would have collapsed. But then, if one more day had been forecast I would have paced myself for eight days as I paced myself for seven this time. Tyson thinks any of our more usual three or four day heat waves for the rest of summer will seem so easy to manage by comparison that we may not turn the aircon on again all season. I have my doubts. I've booked a holiday to southern Victoria in a few weeks to visit my parents rather than ride out the whole summer here - thereby, in two cross-country flights, practically wiping out any footprint gains we make by reducing our domestic power usage here. Ah well. Its about small steps.

Wiping bottoms the green way

One of our earliest monthly actions was to choose cloth nappies.

We also started out with cloth wipes, but soon gave these up and have had three years of disposable wipes for Eva. We continue to be big fans of the Baby Beehinds bamboo nappies we started out with, and bought another set for baby #2 (Eva's ones are still good but losing some absorbency over time, and in my opinion no longer soft enough for a brand new baby bum). I decided it was time to try again with cloth wipes.
 

Three years ago we used old terry towelling cloth nappies cut into squares, and kept a day's supply wet in a tub by the nappy change table. Terry towelling was not soft enough, or effective enough when faced with challenging nappies, and the tub of water bugged me. I'm a little embarrassed that it only recently occurred to me to store dry wipers and just wet them when needed.

After a conversation with Tyson's mum about potential fabric for wipes, she generously whipped us up a batch using an old flannel sheet. They are working exceedingly well. I virtually never need more than one wipe per nappy and they wash perfectly. We have also had no outbreaks of nappy rash.

Initial Time: Cutting the sheet into strips, overlocking, then cutting and overlocking as squares, took about an hour (but not of our time - thanks Grandma!)

Initial Cost: Zero - the sheet was old and spare. Old sheets can be found in op shops if you don't have any. Twenty eight wipes used about half a double bed sheet.

Ongoing time or cost commitment: The time commitment is miniscule - only the seconds it takes to wet a cloth, and adding a few small items to each wash load. However, it is important to get your wiper BEFORE lying the baby down and taking off his nappy... I can't tell you how often this simple step trips me up.

Having reusable wipes is a cost saving. At our rate of use, we have spent over $500 on wipes for Eva.

Impact: When using disposable wipes, we used about 10 per day. Over three years, that is around 11,000 wipes. 

The most immediate impact is, obviously, not putting eleven thousand wipes into landfill (they do not flush - the packaging says so, and the way they launder if accidentally sent through with the nappies confirms that they do not break down in water).

Disposable wipes are a blend of plastic and paper, a material the Huggies website calls 'Coform'. This is very slow to break down - some estimates say wipes may take 300 years to biodegrade.

While researching for this blog post I discovered that others use more like twenty wipes per day, and some over fifty (what are they doing?!). That makes 22,000 to 55,000 wipes per baby. In 2010 (the most recent year for which figures are available), 297,900 babies were born in Australia. If all use twenty disposable wipes per day, that will be over six and a half billion (6,524,010,000) baby wipes into landfill by the end of 2013 for that cohort of babies alone*. Across Australia that would be about 105 tightly packed cubic metres of dirty wipes. 

 

However, its not just the landfill volume of disposable wipes that is detrimental. The Huggies wipes we use are made in the USA. This means the finished product has travelled at least 8647 nautical miles (for you, Hanna - 15849 km to everyone else) and probably considerably further. The individual components of the product also had to travel to reach the factory, very likely internationally, giving a considerable carbon footprint to the product.

Disposable wipes also have many additives. Listed on the Huggies box are: Water, Potassium Laureth Phosphate, Glycerin, Polysorbate 20, Tetrasodium EDTA, Methylparaben, Malic Acid, Methylisothiezolinone, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Extract, Tocopheryl Acetate.

What are all all these additives for? After entirely google-based research I offer you my best guesses:

Potassium Laureth Phosphate: could not find information to say what this does

Glycerin: lubricant and humectant (helps product retain water)

Polysorbate 20: wetting agent, surfactant, emulsifier (helps mix together normally insoluble liquids)

Tetrasodium EDTA: chelating agent (helps dissolve scale)

Methylparaben: antifungal agent

Malic Acid: tightens the pores in skin to make if feel soft and smooth

Methylisothiezolinone: biocide and preservative.

Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Extract: also known as aloe vera, it is used as a moisturiser and anti-irritant, although the lack of scientific evidence for its effectiveness suggest its prime function for Huggies is promotional

Tocopheryl Acetate: preservative, anti-oxidant, moisturiser... because it is Vitamin E to non-chemists.

In short, most of the additives seem to be about keeping baby wipes moist for as long as possible without them going feral.

Even after searching the internet I don't understand what most of the additives are, but I can tell you the majority are synthetic products that appear to be petroleum based. Even those that are naturally occurring (Malic Acid is the acid in apples; Methylparaben is found in blueberries) are not necessarily sourced naturally for commercial use. Methylparaben, for example, appears to be more commonly produced synthetically. More carbon footprint.

While of course all the ingredients have been tested for safety on baby's bottoms in the quantity they are present in nappy wipes, some are toxins in higher quantities. It is difficult to say how concerning this should be. The websites I could find that discuss toxicity all had a slightly hysterical paranoid edge to them, which makes it hard to take even their legitimate concerns seriously, if I could work out which were legitimate. Tests seem to have focussed on the safety of these chemicals at their point of use - that is, for wiping bottoms. I could not find much information about their safety as ingredients of landfill. Concerns have been raised about EDTA becoming a 'persistent organic pollutant', as it is used in so many products - in small quantities, yes, until you add them all together.

All this thinking about bottom wiping also has me asking why I am happy to use cloth wipes for my baby's bottom but not for my own. Poo is poo after all... but I balk at reusing wipes for myself. Is it the chance we might share wipes between the household? What if each family member had their own colour? Separate coloured piles beside each toilet? The main reason I won't go there is because it feels like a leap way across the eccentricity line - no longer 'pretty normal family doing a few interesting things' but into the territory of 'total weirdos who wash their toilet tissue and reuse it...'.

Toilet paper biodegrades, after all, and we use recycled paper. Its a lot of paper, though, which uses water in its production (around 31,000 L per tonne of recycled toilet paper) and has both production (~400kg per tonne) and transportation carbon footprints.

Estimates say Australians use 57 sheets of paper per person per day (20,805 per year) or 94 rolls of paper per Australian household per year. According to the ABS population clock the current populaton here is 22,792,013. Allowing for around 600,000 babies still in nappies, Australia is using about 1.3 billion sheets of loo paper every day, and around 95% of that is NOT recycled paper. On my most recent trip to the supermarket I was appalled to find that all the recycled toilet paper lines had been deleted. I spoke to a floor manager to ensure my concern at this was registered, and went to another store to stock up. I'm not prepared (yet?!) to use cloth wipes for my own toileting, but going the extra mile (well, about 500 metres) to buy and advocate for recycled toilet paper rather than settling for the non-recycled options presented is a commitment I will stick to. Even with two small children in tow who were well over shopping by then and not nearly as sweet about visiting another store as they look in this photo.

Links:
Tips from Environmental Working Group on how to navigate confusing lists of chemicals found in 'personal care products' (I love the fancy language used for the vast array of non-essential items sold as essentials in our culture)
Wipe for Wildlife campaign
Wipe It Out campaign

Info on recycled toilet paper and paper towels

Info on recycling in Australia in general
20 easy ways to be a greener parent - I am proud to say we already do ALL TWENTY at our house!! It was nice to find a list like this that made me feel proud, not guilty, for a change.

* * * * *

* Not all the babies of 2010 will use their thousands of wipes. Despite one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, some babies in Australia don't see out their first three years. One of those 2010 babies was the daughter of dear friends and died at three days old. She will always be missed. I do not take for granted the incredible privilege it is that I am able to make choices about little things like baby wipes for my two healthy children.

Just when you think you can't shade anymore...

When I wrote in December about our summer shading system I thought we had shaded everything we could reasonably manage. But as it got hotter we found more exposed areas that could be protected and added:

additional dense (90% block-out) shade cloth to patch a gap in the rear (southwest) courtyard shading,

 

on very hot days, a towel inside the (northeast) bathroom window, which has no eaves,

on very hot days, an old painting canvas inside the (southwest) laundry glass sliding doors, which get blasted with afternoon sun,

 an old woollen wall hanging on the southwest wall outside Eva's bedroom, and

three towels left on the clothesline all summer along the northwest living area wall.

These also make a good cubby.

Initial Time: Shade cloth: fifteen minutes to bend hooks and hang the cloth; wall hanging:five minutes to put a hook in; towels: 30 seconds each to hang; paint canvas: 30 seconds to balance in place on the grey water bin.

Initial Cost:$20 for shade cloth, zero for towels, paint canvas or wall hanging (which was being thrown out by a family member)

Ongoing time or cost commitment: One or two minutes every week or two to readjust the rear shadecloth as it slips a bit in windy weather; 30 seconds each on hot days to put up the inside towel and paint canvas; probably about ten minutes at the end of summer to pack away for cooler weather.

Impact:A southwest facing vertical surface in Perth in summer receives approximately 3kWh of energy per square metre per day. If the surface is unshaded transparent glass, almost all this energy gets inside the house as heat. The additional shading to our rear courtyard gives 90% shading to about 3 square metres of glass, reducing the amount of heat entering our living area in summer by approximately 8.1 kWh per day. We have a 300% efficient reverse cycle air conditioner in the living area which would use 2.7 kWh of energy to remove 8.1 kWh of heat.So, by shading instead of turning on the airconditioner most days, we are saving 2.7 units of electricity per hot day just with this one area of shade cloth. Put another way, we start to get ahead of the $20 spent on shade cloth on the 27th day of not turning on the aircon. (Thanks Tyson for knowing the numbers!)

In less precise terms, I estimate that this summer it has generally been the third day in any heat wave before we turn on the airconditioner, and last summer I think it was more often the second day. I consider a heat wave to be when the temperature stays at the mid thirties or higher for more than one day. Our airconditioner rarely runs on days with temperatures up to the low thirties (celsius!).

Calculations for the towels and wool hanging shading wall areas, and the paint canvas inside vertical blinds, are more difficult, but we notice that these rooms heat up slower. (In terms of impact, one woolen wall hanging also has a new purpose in life and has been saved from landfill, at least for a while.

Our recent power bill for 22 Dec to 24 Feb shows an average electricity usage of 8 units a day (530 units total), a very very small reduction on the same period last year (10 units less over two months). Most of the past year our average usage has been around 6 units a day, so summer is still presenting the biggest challenges for reducing electricity use at our house. It was the fourth hottest summer in Perth ever recorded (since 1897) and I was going to excuse our tiny reduction by pointing to this fact - until I discovered two of the other three hottest summers were 2009-2010 and 2010-2011. (Its hard to deny climate change when three of the four hottest summers here in the last 115 years were the last three consecutive years... the other was 1997-98). So my alternate excuse for our electricity usage not reducing compared with last summer is that this year I am pregnant and feel hot quicker!

To put our usage in some perspective, however, Synergy (our local electricity supplier) estimates the average household electricity use in WA's southwest grid is 6250 kWh per year (over 17 units per day). Our household's 2011 usage was 2452 kWh (6.7 units per day). We are living a perfectly comfortable existence on that amount of energy.

March 2010 - Laundry & Dishwasher Powder

I had been getting uneasy about the amount of laundry powder that we are letting into the ecosystem, especially as we do eight or nine loads of washing a week keeping the nappies clean,and recycle much of the water onto the garden. This month we made a commitment to purchasing more eco-friendly washing powder. We have a couple of brands as Tyson's parents gave us some, and I also bought a wool wash for occasional use. While we were at it we added eco-friendly dishwasher powder to the equation for good measure.

Initial Cost:  1.5kg of Aware laundry powder costs about $8.40 if its not on special (and so far it hasn't been on special often). This compares with $1.99 for 500g of regular brands (the shelf price is more but I always stock up when its on special). EarthChoice dishwasher tablets cost about $15.80 for a box of 28, compared with about $13 for 1kg of powder from regular brands. I also investigated the products available at our local organic store, but although they were potentially better quality they were outside my price range.

Initial Time: zero

Ongoing time or cost commitment: I estimate we use about 13.5kg of laundry powder a year. Using the prices above, this works out at $75.60 for earth-friendly powder or $54 for regular brands - an extra $21.60 per year. If we average three dishwasher loads a week, the EarthChoice dishwasher tablets will cost us about $95 a year. My rough estimate of how much I spend on regular dishwasher powder in a year came out at about $100, as we get less washes from the powder than from the tablets.

Impact: Its hard to tell precisely what chemicals we have been putting into the water. EarthChoice dishwasher tablets assure me they are biodegradable and phosphate free, but make no promises about their use of petrochemicals. The ingredient list is: sodium carbonate, citric acid, sodium bicarbonate, sodium sulphate, sodium silicate, sodium percarbonate, tetra acetyl ethylene diamine, sodium diethylenetriamine pentamethylene phosponate, glass protection additive, polyacrylic acid, polyethylene glycos, colloidal silica, enzyme, dye. I don't know what that means - but the regular brand I still have a packet of tells me nothing about its contents at all.

Aware laundry powder is also biodegradable and phosphate free, but so is the regular Duo that I still have a packet of. Aware contains no petrochemicals or palm oil (a major cause of deforestation) but uses coconut oils, sugar, citrate salt from corn, and cellulose colloids from cotton and wood pulp.

Mostly I think the impact of our change is to put 13.5kg less of petrochemical-based powder into the environment each year from the washing machine. I'm not sure the difference with the dishwasher.