Buy the best socks, NEVER lose a mate.
Being Green Not Blue
A GREEN PROPOSAL
In the face of a global warming and a steadily increasing price for fuel, Americans are looking for alternative energy sources and ways to conserve energy and reduce their carbon footprint. While not many of us are in a position to develop alternative energy sources, we can all play a role in curbing wasteful habits and reducing energy consumption. And conservation can have an immediate impact on prices. Americans drove 40 billion fewer miles in the 7 months ending 6/30/08 and the price of crude dropped back from $145 to $106.
Below, we detail how using socks with Socklinks™ and modifying a few weekly routines can help you reduce waste and greenhouse gases and conserve significant amounts of energy. Empowering many people to save small amounts of energy each day can result in a very large total savings. And this ant hill approach requires a relatively small investment in equipment, resulting in quick implementation and rapid payback.
First, let’s stop throwing away hundreds of millions of socks every year because the mate has been lost. At last count, Americans—-roughly 300 million of us-- were buying around 2.5 billion pairs of socks each year. The syndrome of losing socks in the wash or traveling is all too well known. So, assuming 10% of those sock purchases relate to lost sock mates, that means that we buy 250 million pairs of socks to replace lost sock mates EACH YEAR. If we assume that it takes only 5 Kwhr (Kilowatt hour) to grow or manufacture the fabric, weave it into yarn, weave the yarn into socks, package and ship the socks to a store, this loss wastes 1.25 BILLION Kwh each year, to say nothing of green house gases it creates and the financial loss to Americans.
Socks linked with Socklink(TM) NEVER get separated. So a pair of socks will stay together until they wear out. They will wear evenly together as well so you are unlikely to don a threadbare sock with a new mate. So step one, save money, conserver energy, cut greenhouse gases by purchasing socks with Socklinks from Link2sox.com—and link your socks together with Socklinks (TM) each night when you remove them.
The second part of our solution is to promote air or sun drying of clothes and simplify the process to make it more palatable for the average household. Sounds too simple to be of much value. But let’s look at the numbers:
The common coal fired power plant expels 210-350 grams (7.4-12.4 oz) of carbon emissions and pollutants (including mercury) when it generates 1 Kwh of energy. A clothes dryer requires approximately 2.5 Kwh of energy to dry a load of laundry. So, on average, each US household is responsible for spewing between 1 and 2 pounds (18.5-31 oz) of pollutants and greenhouse gases into our atmosphere for each load of laundry it runs in a clothes drier.
The average household runs about 10 loads of laundry a week. If such a household hang-dried two of those loads per week, either in the sun or on an indoor rack, it would save 5 Kwh of energy and eliminate 2-4 pounds2 of pollutants per week. Doing this 50 weeks a year saves 250 Kwh and 100-200 pounds of pollutants per household. And if 1 million households were so inclined, the group would save 250-500 million Kwh and eliminate 100-200 million pounds of air pollutants and greenhouse gases each year! If two million households did this each year, they save the energy equivalent to the output of a mid-sized turbine wind energy plant.
But what does it cost? A standard metal clothes drying rack costs about $30. A set of 5 pants clamp/hangers costs $10. Total cost for 1 million households is about $40 million. At $.10/Kwh, first year energy savings are $25-50 million—pretty fast payback. But the real savings is even greater. If dryers are used 20% less, they will last 20% longer—so we reduce the need for raw materials and energy to make new dryers. Furthermore, in dry climates like the Southwest, air drying laundry on a rack indoors actually adds humidity to the house air and combats the dry skin and dry sinus effects of dry air—potentially generating some medical cost savings.
Not so fast. The problem is that it takes longer to hang clothes out to dry than it does to put them in a dryer. So the consumer will have to give up some precious time to achieve the savings. The trick is to minimize the amount of time consumed in hang drying. One way to reduce the hassle of hang drying is to reduce the number of articles handled and save time that would be used sorting clothes coming out of the dryer.
There are 2 socks in the wash for every pair of pants and shirt in a wash. So if sock manufacturers provided consumers with a way to link their socks together before tossing them in the laundry, that would eliminate 25% of the items that needed to be hung out. And if the linking system makes the socks self-hanging, that would save time. And finally, the linking system would eliminate the time it takes to sort part of the laundry—the socks. Finally, linked socks take about 1/5th the space on a drying rack that unlinked socks take up. This is particularly relevant when using indoor hanging racks.
We at Link2sox.com sell high end socks with the patented Socklink™ system to provide handy links on our socks, permanently attached, to start empowering consumers to reap the benefits mentioned above and save an abused planet. Spread the word!
Dynasource, Inc. dba Link2sox.com Denver, Colorado
1 The Economist, September 8, 2007, pg. 26.
2 Business 2.0, September, 2007, pg. 63
Note 1: Rocky Mountain New, September 2, 2007, pg 4E : “The EPA says the typical 4 person US household generates 30-40 tons of C02 each year.”
Note 2: Rocky Mountain News, December 27, 2007, pg. 6 News: Quoting Jeannie Ritter, wife of Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado, on moving into and greening the Governor’s mansion: “One of the first things I did was put in a clothesline.”
COPYRIGHT DYNASOURCE, INC. 2008 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
In the face of a global warming and a steadily increasing price for fuel, Americans are looking for alternative energy sources and ways to conserve energy and reduce their carbon footprint. While not many of us are in a position to develop alternative energy sources, we can all play a role in curbing wasteful habits and reducing energy consumption. And conservation can have an immediate impact on prices. Americans drove 40 billion fewer miles in the 7 months ending 6/30/08 and the price of crude dropped back from $145 to $106.
Below, we detail how using socks with Socklinks™ and modifying a few weekly routines can help you reduce waste and greenhouse gases and conserve significant amounts of energy. Empowering many people to save small amounts of energy each day can result in a very large total savings. And this ant hill approach requires a relatively small investment in equipment, resulting in quick implementation and rapid payback.
First, let’s stop throwing away hundreds of millions of socks every year because the mate has been lost. At last count, Americans—-roughly 300 million of us-- were buying around 2.5 billion pairs of socks each year. The syndrome of losing socks in the wash or traveling is all too well known. So, assuming 10% of those sock purchases relate to lost sock mates, that means that we buy 250 million pairs of socks to replace lost sock mates EACH YEAR. If we assume that it takes only 5 Kwhr (Kilowatt hour) to grow or manufacture the fabric, weave it into yarn, weave the yarn into socks, package and ship the socks to a store, this loss wastes 1.25 BILLION Kwh each year, to say nothing of green house gases it creates and the financial loss to Americans.
Socks linked with Socklink(TM) NEVER get separated. So a pair of socks will stay together until they wear out. They will wear evenly together as well so you are unlikely to don a threadbare sock with a new mate. So step one, save money, conserver energy, cut greenhouse gases by purchasing socks with Socklinks from Link2sox.com—and link your socks together with Socklinks (TM) each night when you remove them.
The second part of our solution is to promote air or sun drying of clothes and simplify the process to make it more palatable for the average household. Sounds too simple to be of much value. But let’s look at the numbers:
The common coal fired power plant expels 210-350 grams (7.4-12.4 oz) of carbon emissions and pollutants (including mercury) when it generates 1 Kwh of energy. A clothes dryer requires approximately 2.5 Kwh of energy to dry a load of laundry. So, on average, each US household is responsible for spewing between 1 and 2 pounds (18.5-31 oz) of pollutants and greenhouse gases into our atmosphere for each load of laundry it runs in a clothes drier.
The average household runs about 10 loads of laundry a week. If such a household hang-dried two of those loads per week, either in the sun or on an indoor rack, it would save 5 Kwh of energy and eliminate 2-4 pounds2 of pollutants per week. Doing this 50 weeks a year saves 250 Kwh and 100-200 pounds of pollutants per household. And if 1 million households were so inclined, the group would save 250-500 million Kwh and eliminate 100-200 million pounds of air pollutants and greenhouse gases each year! If two million households did this each year, they save the energy equivalent to the output of a mid-sized turbine wind energy plant.
But what does it cost? A standard metal clothes drying rack costs about $30. A set of 5 pants clamp/hangers costs $10. Total cost for 1 million households is about $40 million. At $.10/Kwh, first year energy savings are $25-50 million—pretty fast payback. But the real savings is even greater. If dryers are used 20% less, they will last 20% longer—so we reduce the need for raw materials and energy to make new dryers. Furthermore, in dry climates like the Southwest, air drying laundry on a rack indoors actually adds humidity to the house air and combats the dry skin and dry sinus effects of dry air—potentially generating some medical cost savings.
Not so fast. The problem is that it takes longer to hang clothes out to dry than it does to put them in a dryer. So the consumer will have to give up some precious time to achieve the savings. The trick is to minimize the amount of time consumed in hang drying. One way to reduce the hassle of hang drying is to reduce the number of articles handled and save time that would be used sorting clothes coming out of the dryer.
There are 2 socks in the wash for every pair of pants and shirt in a wash. So if sock manufacturers provided consumers with a way to link their socks together before tossing them in the laundry, that would eliminate 25% of the items that needed to be hung out. And if the linking system makes the socks self-hanging, that would save time. And finally, the linking system would eliminate the time it takes to sort part of the laundry—the socks. Finally, linked socks take about 1/5th the space on a drying rack that unlinked socks take up. This is particularly relevant when using indoor hanging racks.
We at Link2sox.com sell high end socks with the patented Socklink™ system to provide handy links on our socks, permanently attached, to start empowering consumers to reap the benefits mentioned above and save an abused planet. Spread the word!
Dynasource, Inc. dba Link2sox.com Denver, Colorado
1 The Economist, September 8, 2007, pg. 26.
2 Business 2.0, September, 2007, pg. 63
Note 1: Rocky Mountain New, September 2, 2007, pg 4E : “The EPA says the typical 4 person US household generates 30-40 tons of C02 each year.”
Note 2: Rocky Mountain News, December 27, 2007, pg. 6 News: Quoting Jeannie Ritter, wife of Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado, on moving into and greening the Governor’s mansion: “One of the first things I did was put in a clothesline.”
COPYRIGHT DYNASOURCE, INC. 2008 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
