Circular Wardrobe (Teil 2/3): Sustainable Keeping
Welcome to part two of our blogpost series: “Circular Wardrobe”. In the following we want to share our ideas about how to take care of clothes and handle them mindfully. After you found your new nice clothes (HOW?? Here you can get some ideas in part 1: „sustainable shopping“),you surely want to take care of them properly, so that they last for long. Therefore, they need some tender loving care!
As you may know, we live in a society where cleanliness and a good, fresh smell is very important. We are used to wash and wash, preferably with additional fabric softener, to give our laundry more and more freshness. Unfortunately, doing so is neither good for our clothes nor for the environment. However, we asked around and gathered some ideas and helpful tips about how to wash with little effort but also in a budget and environmentally friendly way without having to forego fresh clothes:
- Wash less!
Try to smell already worn dresses a second time before putting them into the laundry. Hang them up for airing, often this can already be enough to get a fresh smell. Particularly materials such as wool or silk are happy about infrequent washing cycles and will thank you with a long life. If you really have to wash them, then we advise you to do it by handwashing or a low-level washing program such as for instance the special washing program for wool and silk.In general, we often wash way to hot what leads to an unnecessary high usage of water and energy. Separate your clothes and think about whether you really need to wash it with 60 or 90 degrees. Your jeans for example would often prefer to spend a few hours in the freezer to get rid of its bacteria and at the same time keeps its nice jeans color longer.
For example, the fair and sustainable jeans label “Nudie Jeans” commit that by not washing their new jeans the first six month, will lead to a perfect body fit and will result in a natural and unique embossment. - Use environmentally friendly detergents
For the eager ones of you we found a web page which guides you, to make your own washing agent.
However, the Indian soap nut is our favorite way:
Just grab the necessitate quantity of soap nuts in a small cotton bag and put it, together with your clothes, into the washing machine before starting the program. Better than the common laundry detergents, the soap nuts are free from chemical components like solvents, fragrance, anti-degradant and brightener. Furthermore, the soap nut doesn’t do harm to the environment and is moreover skin-friendly. After using soap nuts, your clothes will be odorless and soft, without the usage of fabric softener. In case you would like your clothes to have a bit of a smell, you may drop some essential oil on your clothing before starting the washing program.For a wash of 60 degrees it is recommended to use the soap nuts only ones. When washing not warmer than 30 – 40 degrees you may use the same bundle of nuts 2-3 times. During our researches for this blogpost we found out, that there exists also a liquid version of soap nuts. If you have difficulties using soap nuts you can of course also use biological detergent.
In general, whether soap nut or not, environment friendly or conventional cleaning agent, the most important thing is that your clothes doesn’t get cleaner when adding more detergent. Being economical when washing will make your wallet and the environment happy!