Donʼt be the stinky person in the room!

6 Tips for keeping laundry fresh naturally.

Around here, we do ALOT of laundry. We are pretty crunchy and try not to use paper towels in the kitchen, we use rags instead, and we use cloth napkins as much as we can. We also have six people in the house. Soooo, lots and lots of laundry. Avoiding the use of endocrine disrupting and cancer causing synthetics is important to us, so we have learned a thing or two over the years about how to keep the laundry situation naturally fresh.

1. If you are a non-cigarette smoker, you can smell when a smoker walks into the room, right? The smoker canʼt smell it but to those who do not smoke, you make the whole room smell like an ashtray almost instantly, yuck. Same thing with Febreze, Tide, and Downy for example. The smell hits us no-synthetic fragrance people like a cloud of toxic smoke. It even makes some people ill with migraines, nausea and vomiting, and that is not to mention the endocrine disruption and cancer they are known to cause. Letʼs all avoid these unnecessary chemicals, ok friends?

2. We recommend using one of the laundry detergents that the EWG rates with an A or B at the least. You can find their list here http://www.ewg.org/guides/cleaners/content/ top_products. (No we are not affiliated with them, we just trust their information as a good source.) Or, if you canʼt do that, commit to using “free and clear” unscented detergents.

3. Donʼt leave wet laundry sitting in the machine or anywhere else for more than a few hours. We used to start a load in the morning, and then come home at the end of the day and switch it to the dryer. Here in NJ where mold and humidity prevails, when you donʼt use strong chemicals, you have to wash and then dry. So for us that means only doing laundry when we will be home to switch it pretty soon after the load is done. This is a little inconvenient, but really helps us avoid the need for stronger laundry chemicals.

4. Leave the washer open when not in use. This helps keep microbes and spores from festering in you wash.

5. In lieu of fabric softener we recommend using one of the wool dryer balls that are available for sale such as these Dryer Balls or these Woolzies Dryer Balls 6 pack.

6. Sometimes you just want stuff to smell extra nice. We also feel that way sometimes, so to freshen things up, we drop a few drops of essential oil on a wood dryer ball or a rag (the oil may stain the direct spot where you put it), before putting it into the dryer. You can use whatever essential oil you are into, and you can always change it up as your inclinations change. So there you have it, fresh laundry that everyone can live with. Hope it helps!  – Ora