The race to design clothes that don’t need washing

When Frans Tim­mer­mans, a Dutch politi­cian and exec­u­tive pres­i­dent for the Euro­pean Green Deal, told EU cit­i­zens to “air out their clothes instead of wash­ing them” to sup­port ener­gy sanc­tions against Rus­sia it caused many a raised eye­brow.

But wash­ing clothes domes­ti­cal­ly has a huge ener­gy foot­print, con­sum­ing an esti­mat­ed 100 tril­lion watts of elec­tric­i­ty glob­al­ly per year, with an addi­tion­al 20 tril­lion litres of water. And while the envi­ron­men­tal impact of fast fash­ion and cloth­ing waste fre­quent­ly makes the head­lines, 25 per cent of a garment’s car­bon foot­print comes from the way we wash and care for it. Wash­ing also releas­es microplas­tics and oth­er fibres into ecosys­tems and reduces a garment’s life – with the result that we need to buy more clothes.

The need to wash clothes less

Con­sumers need to wash their clothes less, says Richard Black­burn, pro­fes­sor of sus­tain­able mate­ri­als at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leeds. “I’m not sug­gest­ing peo­ple should active­ly have poor hygiene – but there is a lot of overkill,” he says. “We don’t work down coalmines any­more. How dirty and smelly do we get?”

He points out we don’t wash our sheets every time we sleep in them, and the lev­el of bac­te­ria, skin and dirt is much high­er in your bed than any item of cloth­ing that we wear. “We need to think about what items we can wear sev­er­al times before they need to be washed,” he says.

Rachel McQueen is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor in tex­tile sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Alber­ta. She says peo­ple do make con­scious deci­sions about what they laun­der and when – accord­ing to the type of cloth­ing and activ­i­ty they’ve done while wear­ing it. “Stud­ies show peo­ple wash jeans and woollen gar­ments less than cot­ton or poly­ester,” she says.

When it comes to exer­cise cloth­ing, her research shows there are two types of peo­ple. Those who are hap­py to work out wear­ing the same cloth­ing repeat­ed­ly, because they’re just going to sweat in it again, and those who find that very thought dis­gust­ing.

“It comes down to how much you think you sweat and smell, which doesn’t always match up with real­i­ty,” she says, although it does appear that some peo­ple are exces­sive sweaters. “Peo­ple real­ly don’t like it if they’ve spent a lot of mon­ey on a per­for­mance top and their cloth­ing stinks. And that gets back to the com­pa­ny.”

The search to develop odour-controlling fabrics

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the sports appar­el indus­try has been close­ly mon­i­tor­ing the devel­op­ment of odour-con­trol­ling fab­rics for many years. Hoi Kwan Lam, exec­u­tive vice-pres­i­dent at tex­tile inno­va­tion com­pa­ny HeiQ, says: “Poly­ester is an amaz­ing fibre for ath­let­ic wear as it’s light­weight, it doesn’t take in mois­ture and it can be enhanced to wick away mois­ture, so the wear­er isn’t sat­u­rat­ed with sweat. But it can smell bad­ly of body odour after you’ve worn it,” she says.

And in some cas­es, even after you’ve washed it, Black­burn says. “It’s been a huge issue the indus­try has been try­ing to solve for years,” he says. “But it’s very hard.”

HeiQ has been at the fore­front of that inno­va­tion, part­ner­ing with brands includ­ing Patag­o­nia, Hugo Boss and Mam­mut. Lam says HeiQ con­sumer research shows odour-con­trol gar­ments can be worn for up to sev­en days with­out wash­ing, sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduc­ing their envi­ron­men­tal foot­print.

HeiQ Pure used sil­ver as an antimi­cro­bial and was the company’s lead­ing tech­nol­o­gy. But NGOs raised con­cerns that sil­ver par­ti­cles can leach out dur­ing wash­ing and enter riv­er and marine ecosys­tems. The research is incon­clu­sive but the com­pa­ny holds a Blue­sign cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for sus­tain­abil­i­ty. It went on to devel­op a sus­tain­able, sil­ver-free alter­na­tive, HeiQ Fresh. This uses an amino sug­ar poly­mer that is derived from a food pro­cess­ing waste prod­uct. It tar­gets the volatile organ­ic com­pounds pro­duced from sweat, not just microor­gan­isms (which sil­ver par­ti­cles work on). The odour on sweaty cloth­ing is not bac­te­ria but the byprod­uct of bac­te­r­i­al res­pi­ra­tion, so even if you could get rid of all the bac­te­ria you wouldn’t elim­i­nate the smell, Black­burn says. 

HeiQ Life uses pep­per­mint oil to con­trol odour. As a raw mate­r­i­al, pep­per­mint works well to com­bat odour but is usu­al­ly cost­ly. “If you can’t find a solu­tion that is finan­cial­ly viable, it isn’t sus­tain­able,” she says.

Will odour-control fabrics change consumer behaviour?

McQueen is scep­ti­cal as to how much odour-con­trol­ling fab­rics will shift how fre­quent­ly we wash our clothes. “Unless it’s bul­let-proof in terms of not pro­duc­ing odour, I’m not con­vinced,” she says. She cites a Nor­we­gian study in the design, cre­ative process and fash­ion indus­try jour­nal Fash­ion Prac­tice, which showed that while the nanosil­ver odour-con­trol­ling fab­rics did work bet­ter than untreat­ed mate­ri­als in con­sumer test­ing, woollen and cot­ton items still fared bet­ter. The weight of cot­ton when it is wet makes it gen­er­al­ly unsuit­able for activewear, how­ev­er, and the mate­r­i­al itself has a large car­bon foot­print. 

Black­burn thinks we should con­sid­er wool as part of the solu­tion to encour­age con­sumers to wash clothes less. “Meri­no wool is an amaz­ing fibre in terms of how it doesn’t cling onto those types of odours. We don’t use enough of it,” he says. “It’s also incred­i­bly biodegrad­able and com­pat­i­ble with the envi­ron­ment. But it comes from ani­mals and that is a prob­lem for the veg­an move­ment.”

It’s also dif­fi­cult to scale up, par­tic­u­lar­ly meri­no wool. “Meri­no wool has a high-qual­i­ty, nice cot­ton feel next to the skin, but we should focus inno­va­tion to use coarse wool. British wool is a by-prod­uct of the meat indus­try and some of it is used in insu­la­tion but not in cloth­ing, and it should be.”

Should the laun­dry brands be con­cerned about the effects on their busi­ness if con­sumers start wear­ing clothes that require less wash­ing? “They have a sus­tain­able ethos of try­ing to get peo­ple to wash on short­er cycles and at low­er tem­per­a­tures,” he says. “But you’re not going to put those com­pa­nies out of busi­ness by wash­ing less fre­quent­ly. Inno­va­tion will be nec­es­sary to main­tain the lev­el of clean­ing we want between wash­es. And they’re prob­a­bly already work­ing on that.”