Supporters applaud their right to dry
Toolbox
By Louis Porter VERMONT PRESS BUREAU - Published: June 5, 2009
MONTPELIER — Flanked by clotheslines on the Statehouse lawn, supporters of a provision tucked into this year's energy bill said Thursday that a simple way of saving electricity might also have something to do with saving New England's character.
The so-called "right to dry" provision would prevent condominium associations, housing complexes and others from stopping residents who want to put up clotheslines to dry their laundry.
It might not seem like much, but when clothes dryers can use more than 15 percent of a household's electricity consumption — and drying them outside uses nothing but a length of string — it can make a difference in energy usage, supporters of the measure said.
"It saves significant amounts of energy, it's voluntary and it's easy," said Sen. Richard McCormack, D-Windsor, whose 20-year ambition of getting the "right to dry" law passed was finally completed this year. "If people want to do that, the least we can do is get out of their way."
It makes sense to Maggie Newton of Brattleboro. The retired physician said she has tried — unsuccessfully so far — to get permission from her condominium association to hang her laundry out to dry. She has even gotten a message from the manager of the building to bring in a wet bathing suit she had hung on a hanger in a crab apple tree, Newton said.
She is looking forward to having the law on her side, Newton said.
"It's a way of conserving energy," Newton said. "They won't be able to say people can't do it."
There might be something at least as important, if a little less tangible, than energy savings at stake, said Vermont Country Store proprietor Lyman Orton. The future of the clothesline might have something to do with what kind of society Vermonters and others live in, said Orton, who has advocated for the right to dry through his store's Web site, catalogue and products.
"We pride ourselves on small town character," he said. "We don't live exclusively, we live inclusively."
That means choosing not to view air-drying clothes as a sign of poverty, but as a sign of thrift and living with neighbors instead of shut away from them, Orton said Thursday at Statehouse event, with clothes hanging behind him.
After all, former Gov. George Aiken said Vermont was a place where "appearance did not count as much as character," Orton said.
McCormack agreed. New England is a place where "even the Ivy League professors take pride in their frayed collars" and "even the rich people consider a bowl of bottom feeders floating in milk to be dinner."
Vermont may have passed the right to dry law, but it wasn't first. In fact, it was in part by suggesting to his colleagues that passing the measure would help the Green Mountain State to catch up to Florida in clothes drying environmental awareness that helped the bill become law, McCormack said.
It is as much a problem of attitude as statute, said Cheryl King Fischer, executive director of the New England Grassroots Environment Fund.
A quick and informal survey of Montpelier yards told her that about 25 percent have clotheslines, Fisher said, leaving 75 percent of houses that could have them.
Her daughter did her own drying rack proselytizing, Fischer added.
"By the end of her college career, she had all of her roommates hanging out their clothes," she said.
The energy bill that passed the Legislature had other, more complicated — but also important —provisions beyond the right to dry measure, said Montpelier Mayor and State Rep. Mary Hooper.
"Our sweet little democracy allows us to bring these things forward," she said.
Alexander Lee, a Concord, N.H. resident and Middlebury College graduate who is also the founder of Project Laundry List, dedicated to advancing such right to dry provisions, said there has been some opposition from some outside of Vermont, including an argument that laundry lines reduce property values. Instead he attributes such opposition to "prudery and snobbery," he said.
And as other parts of the world become larger consumer economies, such things as preventing the end of laundry line clothes drying will become even more important, said Cabot Orton, Lyman Orton's son. For a country with a population as large as China's, which gets much of its electricity from coal, becoming as used to clothes dryers as Americans are would have huge consequences, Cabot Orton said.
"It's a small thing on the local level, but it has massive implications on the global scale," he said.
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