When we look at clothing overall, we consistently find the greatest environmental impact of a garment over its entire life is not in its production, transport or disposal, but in its use by the consumer - washing, drying and ironing.
A recent study of underwear label Chesty Bonds shows up to 80 per cent of their energy consumption happens during customer use. With Levi's jeans, nearly 60 per cent of the environmental impacts come from washing.
This is fairly normal according to Kate Fletcher, who in her 2008 book Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys looked at the environmental impact of the fashion industry and reported that up to 82 per cent of its energy use, 66 per cent of its solid waste and over half of its emissions to air come from washing and drying clothes.
Why do we wash so much?
Our standards of cleanliness have only developed over the past 200 years. Before that weekly, monthly or even yearly baths were pretty normal. Clothes were rarely removed let alone washed. Georges Vigarello's Concepts of Cleanliness tells the story of a French King Louis being surgically removed from a vest he had been wearing for four years.
This does not sound particularly hygienic; we know about germ theory and the importance of keeping clean in controlling disease. But once we're clean enough to stay healthy, escalating cleanliness doesn't really benefit us.
Our preoccupation with cleanliness is due partly to technological developments - it's ridiculously easy to launder clothes these days. But a bigger influence is a change in social conventions. Marketers peddling cleanliness products such as laundry powder sell us elevated cleanliness ideals to increase their business opportunities.
In 2003 the average American household did 392 loads of washing. With an American population of 314 million this is obviously an attractive market. In developing countries, burgeoning middle classes have access to more washing facilities; this creates a huge new market where washing companies can promote increased cleanliness. But these new norms require huge amounts of water, energy and chemicals to satisfy.
What if we wash less?
I wanted to know what would happen if we washed our clothes less, so I recruited 30 participants to wear the same pair of jeans for at least five days a week for three months without washing them. I raised the bar by wearing my jeans every day of the three months except one.
We experienced first-hand that the jeans did not become socially challenging: they weren't visibly dirty and they didn't get smelly. Leonie: "I've started to wear T-shirts for a couple of days in a row and no one's noticed that either."
We also became more aware of how subtle social pressures shape our everyday lives and the decisions we make about cleanliness.
Matt: "You're not rude to people verbally, in the same way I don't like the thought my presence would be rude or offensive to other people."
This made me think about how arbitrary social standards lock us into routine consumption, and how we cruise through life barely aware of the resources concealed in our autopilot actions.
Many of us want to live more sustainably, but our water- and energy-intensive lifestyles have a huge amount of momentum that it takes a serious intervention to become aware of, let alone shift. We need to recode cleanliness standards, based on reality and pragmatism not concepts pushed by marketing: collective conventions that help us navigate everyday life sustainably and hassle-free.
This article is based on a peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Consumer Culture.
Tullia Jack is a PhD Student at RMIT University, Melbourne.
theconversation.edu.au
