While a bit more tedious, air drying your clothing saves you money and helps the environment. (New Africa/Shutterstock)

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The solution to reducing one of your home’s biggest energy hogs might be hanging right in your backyard. New research from the University of Michigan reveals that line-drying clothes, even partially, could cut greenhouse gas emissions from drying by 41-67%, with complete line-drying eliminating them entirely. This low-tech solution often outperforms expensive technological fixes like energy-efficient dryers.

American dryers guzzle 3.1% of all residential energy, six times more than washing machines. Considering dryers contribute to around 27 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually and cost American households nearly $7.7 billion per year, small household changes could have a surprisingly large environmental impact. The study, published in Resources, Conservation & Recycling, highlights that while you could splurge on an expensive electric dryer, shifting to air drying, even occasionally, is an even more effective way to cut costs and emissions.

The study looked at different clothes drying methods across the United States, where a whopping 83% of households own dryers. For comparison, only 43% of German households and 30% of South Korean homes have dryers.

“In most other places in the world, it’s hard to find a clothes dryer,” says lead study author Zhu Zhu, a former master’s student at the University of Michigan, in a statement.

The Hidden Cost of Fluffed Towels

While government efforts to reduce pollution have mostly focused on tech solutions like electrification and energy efficiency standards, this research shows we might be missing the boat on simpler solutions that work better and cost less.

“We tend to focus on technological improvements, but a lot of the time, behavioral changes can have larger impacts,” says co-author Shelie Miller, SEAS professor and co-director of the U-M Center for Sustainable Systems. “If we are going to tackle climate change, we have to think about both cultural and technical solutions.”

The researchers compared several approaches to reducing the environmental impact of clothes drying: upgrading to more efficient ENERGY STAR gas dryers, switching from gas to electric dryers, line-drying clothes, and shifting electric dryer use to off-peak hours when electricity might be cleaner.

For their baseline, they used a standard gas dryer with a 16-year lifespan, which would produce about 2,443 kg of carbon pollution over its lifetime. Upgrading to an efficient ENERGY STAR gas dryer reduced pollution by only 16%.

Savings and sustainability

Results for switching to electric dryers varied wildly depending on where you live. In some places, switching from gas to electric dryers actually increased pollution by up to 223%, while in areas with cleaner electricity, the same switch reduced pollution by up to 91%. In areas powered mainly by coal, dryers cause more pollution than places using cleaner energy sources, like hydroelectric power.

As electricity becomes cleaner over time, the benefits of switching to an electric dryer are expected to grow. By 2044, when average electricity is projected to be cleaner, switching from a standard gas dryer to an ENERGY STAR electric dryer could cut pollution by 17% nationwide.

However, behavioral changes blew these technological solutions out of the water. Completely ditching machine drying through line drying would eliminate dryer-related pollution entirely. Even partial line drying, used when weather permits, could cut pollution by 41-67%, depending on your local climate.

Over the lifetime of a dryer, 100% line drying could save a household more than $2,100. That would also eliminate more than 3 tons of carbon pollution per household over the same time.

While efficiency upgrades and electrification increased lifetime costs by $254 to $721, partial line-drying could actually save households $262 over the 16-year period analyzed in the study. A mix of line drying and dryer use proved to be the second most economical and eco-friendly option, beating out upgrades to more efficient dryers.

For those who aren’t ready to quit their dryers completely, smaller changes can also help. Running dryers at night during “off-peak” hours can reduce pollution by 8%, the study showed.

‘You don’t need a balcony or backyard’

Despite these clear benefits, line-drying remains uncommon in the United States, where cultural norms favor machine drying, and many homeowner associations actually ban outdoor clotheslines. This is completely different from other developed countries where line-drying is common. About 68% of consumers in the UK and France regularly line-dry clothes, and in Japan, approximately 67% of people either don’t have a dryer or rarely use one.

Line drying does make certain fabrics stiff, but that can be fixed with a short spin rather than a full cycle in the dryer. People may also think they live in the wrong place for line drying, but as long as they have a room that doesn’t get too humid or too cold, air drying works fine.

“You don’t need a big balcony or a huge backyard,” says Zhu, who line-dried in his small apartment during college. “Based on my personal experience, you have more capacity than you imagine.”

The researchers calculated that if all U.S. households used a mix of line-drying and machine-drying, we could save approximately 15 million tons of carbon pollution annually. Using a social cost of carbon value of $51/ton translates to potential benefits worth $765 million per year.

Local and state governments could help promote line drying by creating “right-to-dry” laws to overturn clothesline bans (as has already happened in Florida), providing outdoor drying facilities, and launching educational campaigns about its benefits.

“A lot of this is asking ourselves whether the consumption we’re doing is serving our lives in meaningful ways,” says Miller. “The lowest carbon option is always the thing that you don’t do.”

Are we often too quick to reach for technological fixes? For most Americans, the clothesline represents a choice rather than a necessity; a choice that, multiplied across millions of households, could meaningfully reduce our collective carbon footprint while saving money. That’s a rare combination in climate action, and one worth hanging onto.