With all the plastic signs found in hotel bathrooms about saving the planet by reusing towels, I wonder if making the signs doesn’t use more energy than washing and drying the towels.
3 thoughts on “Idle thought from the American road”
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After carefully hanging up my towels, I find that housekeeping will give me newly laundered towels anyway.
We just got back from a trip to Virginia in my truck. Had all of our luggage in the back, wrapped like a burrito in a tarp. Hit a bad thunderstorm in Amarillo and one side of the tarp broke. It was okay as we got ahead of the storm. Stayed in Oklahoma where the storm caught up with us in the middle of the night. Soaked our luggage and everything contained. Didn’t know it until we hit Tennessee. Stayed in a Comfort Inn and discovered (at midnight) that all of our possessions were soaking wet. They let us put our stuff in their ($40,000, we asked) big dryer. Had it ALL dried in fifteen (15) FIFTEEN! minutes. That was about 6 loads of laundry in FIFTEEN! minutes.
I want one of those.
Context is not one of well-intentioned environmentalism’s best things. I, personally, marvel at how the dry west influences behavior in the rest of the country. As always, I blame it on popular media, which live in water-starved southern California. In most of the country, there generally is no water shortage. I live in a city that has, as its front yard, a river a mile wide and fifty feet deep, flowing by at 6 miles an hour 24/7. Yet new construction is still required to use low-flow toilets and shower heads because water is assumed to be as scarce here as it is in California.
One might imagine environmentalism would take into account the local environment. When I lived in L.A., it was all the environmental rage to use cloth diapers instead of disposable. Let’s run through this: the cotton from which the diapers are made is a water-intensive crop that is grown, absurdly, in California’s arid central valley using government-subsidized water. The cotton diapers are then shipped down to L.A., where precious water is used to launder them. So, in the name of fashionable environmentalism, precious water is wasted at both ends of the value chain.
The environmental cost of a plastic sign is probably not as high as the cost of laundering towels in the west, but in the east it probably isn’t worth the trouble. Just wash the freakin’ towels and worry about something meaningful, like why we’re using all that petroleum-based fertilizer to grow corn to turn into alcohol to alleviate our petroleum shortage.