Row after people in France told to save energy by washing clothes less
The advice to ‘wear the same T-shirt for four or five days’ did not wash well with everyone
“Not all clothes are dirty after being worn once”, said the ‘controversial’ article
Rozhnovskaya Tanya/Shutterstock
France’s environmental agency has been forced to defend its advice after a fierce debate erupted when it called on people to “wash their clothes less” in a bid to save energy.
President of environmental and energy agency ADEME (l'Agence de la transition écologique) Sylvain Waserman said that “everyone should do what they want”, but called for “reason and common sense” in response to the row, speaking to FranceInfo today (February 7).
The ADEME article - which states advice such as “not all clothes are dirty after being worn once”, and recommends wearing the same T-shirt for four or five days before washing it, to save water - has provoked strong reactions and criticism.
Mr Waserman said that the agency’s recommendations were simply “designed to raise awareness, and to change perspectives on our daily actions”, and expressed shock that the article had even been hotly debated in the Assemblée Nationale.
He defended the agency’s advice, and said that ”these recommendations are not the core of ADEME's activity”, with the group’s main funding going towards higher-stakes changes, such as “engineers working on decarbonising companies, heat networks and site decontamination”, he said.
Repair, reuse, and recycled cotton
The article categorises clothes into three groups, and recommends different washing schedules for each. It also highlights how much water it takes to manufacture different types of clothing.
Overall, it advises:
Avoid buying too many clothes
Make your clothes last as long as possible, which reduces their overall footprint
Repair your clothes (or get them repaired) instead of throwing them away. For example, a coat with a broken zip, small hole, or loose seam can easily be fixed, and does not require the entire coat to be replaced.
Only wash clothes if they are really dirty.
Opt for clothes made from recycled cotton, linen and hemp. This is because growing cotton requires a lot of water, but alternatives such as recycled cotton or natural fibres such as linen and hemp consume much less water.
Beware synthetic fibres, as they have other environmental impacts (such as polluting the oceans with microplastics, and using petroleum in their manufacturing process).
Choose clothes that are less processed or dyed. Unbleached, undyed clothes require much less water to produce. Choosing natural colours reduces the water footprint.
‘10 Eiffel Towers of plastic’
The agency also has other recommendations to help people reduce waste.
For example, it advises people to change their washing habits by making small tweaks such as buying solid soap instead of shower gel in plastic bottles. More than 185 million plastic shower gel bottles are disposed of in France every year, the agency said.
“A shower gel is a plastic bottle with 85% water and a little bit of active ingredient, so if you buy soap instead of shower gel, it's less plastic,” said Mr Waserman. “[185 million bottles equates to] 10 Eiffel Towers of plastic, just because we use shower gel instead of soap."
