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Every Sunday I do my ironing. I have to wear reasonably "smart" clothes to work four days a week and on Friday we're allowed to dress down. Every Sunday night, depending on how tired I am, I try to iron four shirts and a pair of trousers.
It has always occurred to me that ironing clothes is a waste of time and energy. It serves no purpose other than to adhere to a social convention. If I were putting Lean Six Sigma onto my life, I think it would probably come under the category of "necessary waste" since it is there to comply with the law (an unwritten social law enforced by the Central Scrutinizer) which adds no value to the value stream.
I just found a calculation I did about three years ago to work out the impact to atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions that ironing clothes causes.
I used official UK government statistics on the proportion of electricity generated by fossil fuels and the carbon dioxide gas produced.
I have no idea if these links are still valid.
Carbon Dioxide (Equivalent) Emissions from Electricity Generation (2013)
Historical elctricity data: 1920 to 2013
For my calculations. my electrical iron is rated at 2kW and I estimated the heater to be operational 50% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to iron a single item, and I do 5 at a time.
To cut a long story short, I calculated that in the UK, given 2013 electricity generation data, 1 million of me doing my ironing would produce about 244.5 Te of carbon dioxide gas.
Here's my data:
Constants
Seconds per Minute 60
kcal/joule 0.000239005736
1 billion 1000000000
Seconds per Hour 3600
1 million 1000000Iron Power (W) 2000
Time to Iron (mins) 5
Time Heating (%) 50
Energy per Item (J) 300000
Energy per Item (kcal) 71.7017208MtCO2e 178.5
Energy Supplied (Gwh) 304155CO2(kg) 178500000000
Energy Supplied (J) 1.094958E+018
Mass of CO2/unit energy (kg/J) 1.63019951450193E-07CO2e(kg) per item ironed 0.048905985435058
CO2e(kg) per million items ironed 48905.9854350578
CO2(Te) per million items ironed 48.9059854350578Items/person/week 5
1 Million People (Te) 244.529927175289
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 21 2017, @10:43PM
If you don't like the social conventions at your job, you can quit. Quit now and join me under the bridge. We the hobos have ultimate freedom. We don't have social conventions, dress codes, deadlines, coworkers, stress, or money. We do what we want when we want. When we're hungry, we eat. When we're tired, we sleep. When we're horny, we masturbate. When we're bored, we write free software. We license our free software under the GNU GPL so everyone can use it. You might be using free sotware right now that was written by a hobo under a bridge, and you might not even know it. Join us. Life is worth living when you have the ultimate freedom of the coder hobo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @03:21PM (6 children)
I never ironed. Even if you don't have a de-crease programme on your tumble dryer, you can just take your clothes out of the dryer and hang them while they're still warm.
(Score: 2) by microtodd on Monday May 22 2017, @05:19PM (5 children)
I found relatively wrinkle-free pants and shirts, and just hang them in the bathroom whilst I shower. They're usually "good enough".
Or send all your shirts to be professionally pressed.
Or just start wearing polo shirts to work, so they don't need to be ironed.
But yeah, I get your point. How much stupid stuff do we do as a society that is wasteful? Disposable water bottles. Individually wrapped toothpicks. Here's my pet peeve: Christmas Trees. Let's harvest and kill millions of trees every year for no god damned good purpose at all. Suck nutrients out of the soil, fill up landfills, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @05:43PM
I don't do Christmas either although I do wonder if the purpose of human life is not simply to redistribute mineral deposits and increase entropy? Perhaps then, there is a point to ironing our clothes and celebrating Christmas?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @05:44PM (2 children)
.... registered accounts, personal homepages, journal entries....
You've chosen your forms of social signalling, dickweed.
(Score: 2) by https on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:12AM (1 child)
If you subscribe to the notion of social signalling, you're flashing a pretty large neon sign yourself with that post.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @04:01AM
Yeah! The signal is who I am doesn't matter!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:52AM
If you're actually putting your tree in a landfill, just file it under carbon sequestration -- not a waste of time, we're saving the planet! (From all the CO2 from burning oil to haul the christmas trees around... maybe it's carbon neutral, if you're very lucky?)
But, back when we messed around with a tree (don't any more, because as the kids got older/saner, the fun of picking out, felling, and decorating is no longer enough to outweigh the labor), we always chucked it on the burn pile, and burnt it along with the other brush/prunings next time we got to it. Not so hot for CO2, but it does save half the transportation time/cost/energy, and the nutrients are in concentrated ash form ready to put back into your garden (as long as you know what you're doing regarding pH).
If you live somewhere without a backyard to burn shit in, that obviously doesn't work, but I was under the impression city folk had pretty much switched over to fake trees anyhow...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 23 2017, @02:16AM (1 child)
Clothes that never need to be ironed because of nanoparticles and nanothreads. Silicon Valley can solve this problem! Resist the siren call of the man under the bridge!
https://nice.asu.edu/nano/nanotechnology-textiles%E2%80%94wrinkle-resistant-stain-resistant-and-antimicrobial-clothing [asu.edu]
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=42713.php [nanowerk.com]
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3892457 [npr.org]
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2004-12-31-kantor_x.htm [usatoday.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday May 23 2017, @08:50AM
Or we could just hack society to make wrinkly clothes socially acceptable :-)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:34AM (1 child)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:29PM
i only iron when on business trips, provided that I am allowed time to unpack. Otherwise... the iron gets used in case my mother visits and needs to know I am keeping my appearances up when she isn't around. I dust the iron to make it appear to have seen recent use, and all is well.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday August 10 2017, @03:54PM
In certain places in Africa (and possibly other places) ironing is a sensible practice as it kills the fly larvae that can use humans as accidental hosts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordylobia_anthropophaga [wikipedia.org]
While this fly's range doesn't include Europe/UK, it doesn't meant there are not other local pests prevented by ironing.