Microfibers Released into the Air from a Household Tumble Dryer
pubs.acs.org
pubs.acs.org
I'm not saying it's a Herculean task but it's going to take time and you'd better to it right. Doing it wrong is a great way to stretch your cloths out and possibly damage them. This is just not the kind of time most people working full time are going to have.
You can leave it out while you're at work but you'll probably only do that until the first time it rains while you're at work and you have to pick up the cloths that blew off and ended up in the dirt and the rest of your clothes are soaked. What about people that live in the city? They don't generally even have a washer and dryer. They'll go to the laundromat. Do you want them to carry the wet heavy cloths home?
In the interim, I replaced the dryer with a chrome (Ikea) shelving unit, a vapour barrier shroud (literally 5mil plastic), and a regular house dehumidifier.
For a full load of towels--or any heavy water absorbing material really--run times were about 2-3-5 hours. Clothing would be brought to the whatever humidity value "Continuous Operation" would cause. In general I assumed that was lower than line drying would cause, but less than line drying with direct sun exposure.
There was some effort involved in sorting clothing onto shelves. But very little real effort. About as quick to shelve and unshelve a full load as... well, doing just that. (10 minutes?)
I would probably avoid this with clothing that rest against high-bacterial load, high-smell areas (armpits, feet). Or more importantly, change my process for washing those items.
It would be a relatively straight-forward process to build a large drum machine based on an industrial dryer barrel, and attach an inline dehumidifier, and then run the drum in an intermittent mix mode.
How many clothes could you possibly get onto an Ikea rack? 10min to rack the shelves but how many racks of cloths? If you were working all day that would be one rack worth per day. Maybe you're doing some sort of minimalist thing but this isn't going to work for a large number of people. There is no way an Ikea rack is going to be able to handle an entire load so you're either leaving most of the cloths in the washing machine wet while you dry each rack or you're running extremely small loads which has its own environmental impact since it's much less efficient than a single large load.
I've seen this a lot with "eco" solutions. When you start counting all the real costs, all of them, like bringing in a plumber because your "eco" solution screwed up the plumbing or to fix the Rube Goldberg machine you've created to save one watt of electricity, or the enormous material costs of your complex solution you find that what you've already got is probably close to the best you can do. I could replace my less than optimal window and it would probably cost me $300 and I doubt I would even see the difference in the heating bill but just consider how much energy it takes to melt glass. I'd be willing to bet it's more energy than will pass through that inefficient window in its entire lifetime.
I'm sure we could solve this problem, and scale it, if we could get a good funding round. ;-)
What's crazy is that there are cities that outright ban outdoor (line) air drying. In my city, they don't actually mention clotheslines, but a former neighbor of mine was given a fine for erecting a 'structure' without a permit, in the form of a single line (on which she hung her laundry) running from the house to the detached garage.
It’s really fast since the air usually has very low humidity.
It’s really efficient since you’re not actively pumping warm air outside, and your furnace is driving the evaporation process (which is likely “high” efficiency).
Drying in humid weather is what can take a while.
Plus, your house would get humid fast with indoor drying. Around here people don't often have aircos that can dehumidify, so opening the windows is the only solution, reducing efficiency even further. And keeping the moist inside also causes heating costs to go up, since you've just increased the thermal mass of your air. Plus, moist indoor air has adverse health effects of its own. Plus: I'd basically need to reserve a room just for drying.
No, a dryer is on all accounts the better solution.
I don't understand the need for dryers. The houses I've lived in have always had drying racks in the laundry, next to the washing machine and central heating boiler.
Clothes get taken out of the washing machine, hung on the drying rack, and 6-24 hours later they are dry. Works 365 days a year, regardless of weather. Free.
In my current place, the drying racks are wall-mounted and foldable, and push back against the wall when not in use. Previously I've had ceiling mounted ones.
I imagine it would be a bigger problem in a well sealed building. Fortunately most of the houses in Edinburgh are very leaky.
Older housing was much more permeable, so moisture (and unfortunately heat) could escape to the outside air at will. I'm sure that the cost of running a dehumidifier is at least as low as the cost of running your heating more frequently because of heat loss.
However, these fabrics are shedding lint into the air when worked and worn and out too, to some extent, even if not to the rate and with the spray that agitation and hot air give them.
The obvious solution for maximum health is to wear nothing but animal leather (birthday suits count!) and live outdoors.
However, despite all that, I still notice more lint in dust around my house in months I use the dryer. I suspect the dryer has a poor seal around the front and back of the drum (the seals are just made of felt, and as heavy clothes bounce around I think they briefly lose contact). That allows steamy linty air to leak into the body of the machine, and eventually escape out of cooling vents.
Instead it's the stuff the masses masturbates to, homeopathic microfibers which eat at our souls.
Science is broken, they could have tacked the real data on at small cost and have kept their self worth, but they don't even pretend to be real anymore.