Day 12: Feet your wash

Zero Waste challenge
Jas (The Ginger) and Morgana (The Vegan) are undertaking the Zero Waste Challenge: finding ways to refuse, reuse, reduce, and recycle as much as possible in their lives, and ask you to join them on their journey.

The Problem
It is a truth universally acknowledged that absolutely nobody even remotely enjoys doing laundry. It is one of the more "drudgery" of household tasks, and the stock image of all tired mums on the internet.

The thing is, not only is laundry kind of a pain, it's also really bad for your finances and for nature. It can be as much as 30 percent of your water bill.

The Solution
Stamp on your clothes.
Yes, as you can see from the pictures below, this looks definitely ridiculous on many levels. But this water-saving measure is better for your clothes and is just as effective in terms of cleaning. Stamping on things, namely grapes, is also how the Romans made wine so it must be efficient. It counts as a workout too (probably).

Here is a step by step guide on how to stamp on/clean your clothes:

3 Actions Project

It’s a slightly different way of washing your clothes, but on our mission to go zero waste, this was the biggest compromise we could make, rather than never washing our clothes again.
We could probably make the whole endeavour even more "zero wasty and get some refillable, non-chemical laundry detergent too. Wild Times.

Evaluation
We are conflicted by this challenge. It definitely cleaned our clothes as well as a washing machine would, and saved us about five euros. Blame Amsterdam for that price of one wash. Whilst it only took about sevenish minutes of our time, it felt like longer, and it took longer for our clothes to dry because of the lack of a spin cycle.
The grey water stage was mildly horrifying/majorly satisfying, and this is not something to do if you’re weirded out by feet.
Our version of this made a mess. Let’s just say, make sure you are using a DEFINITELY waterproof container. Jas’ rug is still recovering. We still recommend hand washing clothes every now and again, perhaps only in the sink, when you’re out of fresh underwear to let your washes stretch a bit further and reduce that extra water waste.

This article is part of our 30 days Zero Waste challenge.
Read what Jas and Morgana were up to in the past few days.


Day 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11

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