50 Acts of Green: Day One - Laundry Rack

50 Acts of Green

2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. I had been planning on doing a dinner church series during the season of Easter with my church, St. John's, around the topic of creation care. With the way things are going with the Coronavirus Pandemic, this dinner church series is not going to happen. However, I still want to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day with the 50 Days of Easter.

I have decided that each day I will take a picture of something in my life that I am doing or have changed in order to be more environmentally friendly and caring towards the Earth. Each day, for the next 50 days, I will celebrate the spring, the Earth, our creation, and the resurrection of new life in Jesus Christ and share this celebration with you.

Just to be honest, most of the things I am going to talk about I have started in the last nine months. Some of them I am fairly new to, some of them I have been doing for a while. (I made a list of all the things I am doing and only came up with forty some, so I am going to have to find some new ones to do in the next fifty days!)

Today is Easter Sunday and the beginning of the Easter Sunday, day one of fifty. Alleluia! The Lord is Risen! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

I am going to start this journey with laundry. This is where I started my environmentally friendly overhaul because there are many small things which can be done fairly easily and can make a good difference for the world. This week will be all about laundry!

I am lucky enough to have a separate laundry room in the St. John's Rectory. It is a lovely Gregorian blue. In it I have added a laundry line and a laundry rack. Both are extremely helpful for me in cutting down the amount of laundry I need to send through the dryer.

Dryers use a huge amount of electricity. When you do the typical calculations, most dryers cost around $250-300 a year to run in cost of electricity. Which may not sound like a lot for one dryer, but add up all of our dryers, and a huge amount of our energy usage goes to doing something which will typically happen naturally and for free on a drying rack. I haven't quite given up my dryer yet, but I have cut down my usage of it in half.

One act of green, one way to cut down on energy consumption. Alleluia!

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