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Change the Way You Wash your Hair to Help Save the Environment

posted by martyb on Tuesday February 12 2019, @09:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the read-this-while-having-a-nice,-hot-cup-of-tea dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

When you hear about businesses with a high environmental impact or activities with a high carbon footprint, you are probably more likely to imagine heavy machinery, engines and oil rather than hairdressing. Yet hairdressing, both as a sector and as an individual activity, can have a massive carbon footprint.

Hairdressing uses high levels of hot water, energy and chemicals. Similarly, in our homes, heating hot water is typically the most energy intensive activity. For the cost of a ten-minute shower that uses an electric immersion heater, you could leave a typical television on for 20 hours.

So while it helps to turn lights and appliances off, the real gains in terms of reducing energy usage are in slashing our use of hot water. A quarter of UK emissions are residential and, of those, the vast majority come from running hot water. The longer it runs and the hotter it is, the more energy intensive (and costly) it is.

Mostly the hot water used carries a high carbon footprint, but the chemicals in shampoo don't help either.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 12 2019, @12:18PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday February 12 2019, @12:18PM (#800037) Homepage
    Indeed. As long as you keep it clean, a face cloth will sort out all your sebacious areas quickly and with minimal resource usage. I know some people get all squicky about them (note the 'keep it clean' above), but a twice-daily flannel wash removes all I want to remove, and leaves all I want to leave. (Yes, I want to leave some of the natural moisture in my skin, thank you, I don't want to become a dried up old husk.) Of course, never doing one dot of exercise or hard work helps this greatly.
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