How often should you wash your clothes? Doctors don’t really know, but the decision is more cultural than medical, anyway. Worried about leaving the house in sweaty shirts or stained shorts, people often chuck clean clothes in the laundry basket after wearing them just once.
But the urge to avoid whiffy garments carries a climate cost that has largely been ignored. New research shows that feelings of disgust and shame encourage excessive clothes washing even among those who care about their carbon footprint.
Swedish scientists surveyed a representative sample of 2,000 people and found that when asked, in effect, to air their dirty laundry, their fear of being seen as unclean overpowered environmental identities.
When it comes to behaviours, “disgust simply wins out”, said Erik Klint, a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg, Sweden, and lead author of the study. “The study shows that the higher our sensitivity to disgust, the more we wash, regardless of whether we value our environmental identity highly.”
Klint and his colleague knew from previous research that many people do not link their laundry to the environment, despite washing machines draining energy and water. After seeing that studies to alter habits had mostly failed, the researchers decided to explore the societal dimensions that make people overwash clothes.
They found a high sensitivity to disgust, shame or violations of cleanliness norms was associated with frequent use of washing machines. They found no such effect for environmental beliefs.
The dilemma, the scientists concluded, is that the risk of societal pushback takes priority over abstract intentions such as reducing emissions.
Klint said disgust was an evolutionary trait used as a proxy for potential pathogens. “In practice this means that people intuitively must weigh an evolutionarily rooted driving force against a moral standpoint.”
Fast fashion has long been under fire from sustainably minded shoppers, but wasteful washing practices have so far escaped much attention. The average European household does four to five loads of laundry a week, and though the frequency of washing has stayed steady for 20 years, the size of the machines’ drums has grown. The share of devices that could hold 6kg rose from 2% of sales in 2004 to 64% in 2015, according to a report commissioned by the French environment agency.