Moving from the Oval Office to your laundry room

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/02/2025 (254 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As I watched the Oval Office scene unfold between the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful politician, Elon Musk’s kid was also in the room. “Take your kid to work day” apparently applies to billionaires, too.

This scene, however, was orchestrated to drive home to us ordinary folks watching that the elites hold power and money beyond anything we can imagine, and despite anything we can do in opposition or even in protest.

It’s the bedtime story they need to tell each other, and their children, to prevent the nightmares that reality (and history) inevitably supplies. “Let them eat cake!” no doubt sounded like clever elitist repartee to Queen Marie Antoinette, but it led to an outcome that she and others found hard to swallow.

So, to offer a different narrative, one outside the Oval Office and over which you have some control, I want to talk about your clothes. And your laundry.

In sketching the unsustainable society in which we live, we can identify things that have an observable impact on both local and global conditions. There are greenhouse gas emissions, growing every year when they need to drop, to keep us from frying our future selves. There are microplastics in the water that bioaccumulate in our brains, affecting our ability to think properly and increasing the likelihood of cancers we might otherwise have dodged.

There is our overburdened planet, whose resources we overspend on lifestyles we can’t afford, watching our ecological debts to future generations (and our own economic debts) spiral upward, every day — seemingly without limit, but actually headed for disaster.

So what has this got to do with my clothes and my laundry?

Ten per cent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, according to UNEP data from 2023, come from the various dimensions of the fashion industry, worldwide.

Did you know that much of the clothing we buy — estimated at 68 new items, per person, every year — ends up in landfill, to the annual tune of something like 92 million tons, in under 12 months from date of purchase?

As for the water needed to produce all that clothing and then wash it, rough estimates are that it requires around 110 billion cubic metres of water per year, or about six per cent of total global water usage. Consider the microplastics that anything not cotton sheds into the water system when we wash it, and more of the ecological problem is revealed.

We need to change our trajectory from disaster toward a sustainable future for our children and grandchildren. While we do not have the power to change everything right away, we can leverage significant social change anyway — one person, one choice at a time, regardless of whatever is said in the Oval Office.

So here is a simple proposal: Wear it twice. It will be just as clean the next day.

If we wore everything twice we would need half as much clothing, right? We could (in theory) cut in half all the resources used, all the greenhouse gas emissions, all the water required, to produce the clothes we wear.

Did you know that the modern popular obsession with clean clothes (and new clothes) is fairly recent? It is a deliberate product of the advertising industry since the 1920s — more about conspicuous consumption than being clean.

Doing the laundry isn’t anyone’s favourite activity. But just imagine if you had to scrub every piece of clothing on a washboard (or a rock), wringing it out by hand and then hanging it up somewhere to (eventually) dry.

Back in the day, most people didn’t have (or need) many clothes, in part because washing the clothing they had was enough of a chore. You had Washday Mondays, because laundry literally took all day.

One of the major changes in social technology was the widespread adoption of the washing machine after 1918. Add indoor plumbing and water heaters to the wringer (and then automatic) washer, and advertising had a field day marketing the importance of personal hygiene and cleanliness in the home in the 1920s and 1930s.

Scholars now talk about the “invention” of the household germ, and how supposed labour-saving machines like the washing machine actually created “more work for mother,” not less.

It’s now 2025, however. Wear your clothes twice. Make it a household decision, a classroom project, something your church, club or organization promotes. Our wealth, privilege and impact on a hurting planet is measured by the unnecessary clothing in our closets. We have control over our clothes, and our laundry — how much we have and how often we wash it.

We are constantly suckered into fast fashion, poor quality, fads and frauds, spawned by a clothing industry on its own mad dash to climate oblivion. Change that thoughtless culture of over-consumption into a culture that reflects care for each other and the planet through wearing your clothes twice before washing them.

Be a WIT (Wear It Twice), not a twit.

Peter Denton writes (and does occasional laundry) in his rural Manitoba home.