Carbon output from a washing machine
This is a guest post by Julian Koebel, who was trying to measure the carbon footprint of washing clothes.
Niel and I were having a discussion about the carbon footprint of washing clothes. We could not find a good number for that on the web, so we just did a quick calculation ourselves. Assuming that one would do 2 washings a week, we came up with a yearly 90kg saving in CO2 emissions if the temperature is reduced from 60° to 30°.
We used the heat capacity of water to figure out the energy demand and multiplied that by the amount of water an average household washing machine would use (55l). Knowing the carbon intensity of electric energy in our college (Linacre College, Oxford) it was just another step to find the difference in associated carbon dioxide emissions.
Uncategorized | julian | 
3 February 2010 18:12
Subscribe