Articles tagged “Eco-Friendly Laundry”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Detox Your Home: In the Laundry Room, Part 1 By Team Planet Green IN Home & Garden Feb 20 2008 Doing the laundry should be all about getting squeaky clean. So why are some conventional products all washed up? Our tips for kinder, gentler laundry are as gentle on your delicates as they are on the planet, while still getting the job done right. + READ MORE

Detox Your Home: Room by Room By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Feb 20 2008 Homes are the sanctuaries where we play, rest, eat, and gather with family and friends.To find out how you can build a safer indoor environment for yourself, your family, and your pets, while also improving the health of the planet, click through to our latest feature, Detox Your Home: Room by Room. + READ MORE

Find 21 New Uses for Old Tennis Balls By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Feb 15 2008 Just because your old tennis ball has lost its bounce, doesn't mean it can n't serve up an extra use or two. Use to clean black scuff marks, from any hard-surface floor, by cutting a hole in the ball and staking it with an old broom handle 12. + READ MORE

Repair or Replace (and Recycle): Your Clothes Dryer By Collin Dunn IN Home & Garden Feb 12 2008 This is the fourth post in a series about determining whether your should repair or replace (and recycle) a broken appliance. That means that over its expected lifetime of 18 years, the average clothes dryer will cost you approximately ,530 to operate, so cutting back whenever you can really adds up.If you do find... + READ MORE

Repair or Replace (and Recycle): Your Washing Machine By Collin Dunn IN Home & Garden Feb 11 2008 This is the third post in a series about determining whether your should repair or replace (and recycle) a broken appliance. One more stat to add to the equation: 90 percent of the energy costs of running a clothes washer comes from heating water, so a little more water per cycle in an old machine adds up to a lot more + READ MORE

Give Your Detergent a Boost By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Jan 30 2008 Want to give stretch out your laundry detergent? Because these minerals soften the water, they increase the detergent's power, allowing you to skimp a little on the suds, while giving you whiter whites and brighter colors.For liquid detergent, add 1/2 cup of soda at the beginning of the wash. + READ MORE

Dry Clean Your Clothes Without Harming the Planet By Collin Dunn IN Fashion & Beauty Jan 23 2008 It'd be great if we could all just toss our clothes into the washing machine (with the cold/cold setting, of course), but lots of wintertime wear, like wool sweaters and jackets, have the "dry clean only" label attached. Unfortunately, conventional dry cleaning is a decidedly un-green process-most dry cleaners use the... + READ MORE

Give the Gift of Change By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Jan 10 2008 You care about the environment and wish more people did. For 9.99, you get a recycled- or organic-cotton tote filled with a reusable SIGG water bottle, a CFL, and an organic-cotton T-shirt. ::Greensender Start small with a 0 Green-kit Starter Pack comprising bottles of all-purpose spray and dish-washing liquid,... + READ MORE

Sew a Recycled Sweater Quilt By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Jan 8 2008 Over at Instructables, user Sun Moon Lake shows us how to patch together a cozy quilt from castoff sweaters. A common laundry uh-oh, shrunken sweaters are the result of animal fibers matting together when heat and moisture are applied in the washing machine and dryer. + READ MORE

Choose Baby-Safe Bottles, Formula By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Dec 20 2007 Breast milk is the golden standard of infant nutrition, but if your tot will be chugging down pumped breast milk or supplementary formula, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has a laundry list of what to look for when you're shopping for feeding bottles: 1. Use filtered tap water: If your water is fluoridated, use a + READ MORE

Reuse Your Old Pillowcase By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Dec 18 2007 Before you consign your stained and faded pillowcases to the dumpster, TipNut has 10 ways you can repurpose your erstwhile head cushions, including using them as dust covers or turning them into drawstring laundry bags, garment bags, or even a pair of protective oven mitts. + READ MORE

Unstiffen Your Line-Dried Laundry By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Nov 30 2007 Appliances and home electronics account for 20 percent of your energy bill, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, with refrigerators, clothes washers, and clothes dryers hogging the biggest chunks of that pie. Based on national averages, a typical clothes dryer costs nearly 3 per year to run, so it might seem a + READ MORE

Beat the Heat, Wash in Cold By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Nov 20 2007 Carbon Conscious Consumer (C3), a national climate campaign sponsored by the Center for a New American Dream, has a new challenge for November: Wash at least four out of every five loads of laundry in cold water. If you keep washing 80 percent of the loads in cold water for a year, you'll save more than 0 in energy... + READ MORE

Take it Easy: Sloth is Green. By Lloyd Alter IN Home & Garden Nov 15 2007 Art credit: Hieronymus Bosch: The Seven Deadly Sins, Sloth Who knew that putting off today what you can do tomorrow, that being slothful and lazy was so good for the environment. Cut down on your shopping trips: You willn't have to get in your car, find a parking space, deal with the crowds, pull your wallet out, carry + READ MORE

Ditch the Dryer Sheets By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Home & Garden Nov 14 2007 Skip the toxic dryer sheets the next time you do a load of laundry. Fill an undyed cotton or linen drawstring sachet with dried organic lavender, give the bag a few squeezes to release the fragrance, and then toss it into the dryer with your laundry. + READ MORE

Save Energy by Avoiding Phantom Power By Collin Dunn IN Tech & Transport Nov 5 2007 Though it's known by a laundry list of names-phantom load, idle current, vampire power and wall wart are the most common-this "phantom energy" all does the same thing: sucks extra energy from the grid into your home when you aren't looking and you don't need it.There are a handful of devices designed specifically to... + READ MORE

Hack Your Swiffer By Jasmin Malik Chua IN Tech & Transport Aug 27 2007 We're still not sure what Gianfranco Zaccai, CEO of the design consultancy that brought us the Swiffer, was smoking when he called P&G's best-selling (and admittedly revolutionary) cleaning system "eco-friendly." A sheet of magnetic rubber and some adhesive can turn your dust mop into a handy screw retriever you can... + READ MORE