I looked up my parents’ house in London on Google Earth, and was excited to see not just the lush greenery of their garden, but smack in the middle of it, their rotary clothes line. This may not seem so thrilling to the average reader, but outdoor clothes lines are cool these days, and my parents have had one forever. In rainy Olde Englande, that’s quite a feat. It’s also the environmentally friendly thing to do: stuffing the clothes in a dryer generates a walloping 4.4 pounds of carbon dioxide. Line-dried clothes smell garden-fresh and don’t shrink, either, although they may form an occasional target for birds. Alas, some 60 million people in the U.S. live in private communities that forbid line-drying, since many view fluttering underwear as an eyesore that lowers property values.
The times are changing, however: as of 2009, the states of Florida, Colorado, Utah, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have passed laws forbidding clothes line bans. So I was pleased to read of the Care to Air Design Challenge, aka build a better clothes line. Or, as sponsor Levi Strauss & Co calls it, the search for “the world’s most innovative, covetable, and sustainable air-drying solution for clothing.”
Winners, who share $10,000 in prize money, were announced on Monday in San Francisco. My favorite entry is Cirrus, which doubles up as gray water recycling system “sustaining an indoor, vertical garden of non-edible plant species.” Laundry is suspended through a roller system (instead of pins) squeezing out water which can then be used to irrigate plants in biodegradable cardboard “modules” (I suppose that’s a fancy word for “pots.”)
Then there’s Inertion Power, submitted by Andrey Kotsyuba from the Ukraine, which looks like a kind of collapsible windmill. According to Mr. Kotsyuba, the contraption works “on the principle of the pendulum, driven by inertial forces, creating a flow of air passing along the clothes.”
From Lithuania comes the Levitower, a sculpture made out of coloured organic glass punctured with triangular holes, held up by a stainless steel pole. I’m not sure where the clothes go, but according to its creators, the height of a levitower “creates a constant draught inside of it, which helps clothes dry faster.” A charming artist’s impression depicts nonchalant New Yorkers sitting calmly in deckchairs in Central Park, surrounded by the towers.
Winner of the $4500 first prize is Nothing is What is Seems, which doubles as a piece of art work decorated with hands spelling out “nothing” in American Sign Language. Pull out the rack from the wall-mounted frame, and you can hang a large load of laundry on the bars. Creator Caleb Hill says he hopes it will become a conversation piece in the home, provoking “discussion of issues concerning sustainability.” I must say it’s a lot prettier than the old rack I stick in my bathtub. Although I do feel a certain nostalgia for all those shirts and sheets, flapping away in the cold English wind.
Image courtesy of Alessandra Elle