“One of the worst things that you can do to a garment, in terms of its durability, is wash it.” So says Mark Sumner, a lecturer in sustainable fashion at the University of Leeds. During a wash, he says, garments can tear, shrink and lose colour. With his colleague Mark Taylor, Sumner studies how microfibres from household laundry end up in marine animals. But while he says reducing the frequency of our clothes washing is the right choice for the environment, he doesn’t advocate a complete washing machine moratorium.
“We don’t want people to think that they can’t wash stuff because… they’re destroying the planet,” Sumner tells BBC Culture. “It’s about trying to get the balance right.” Washing clothes is important for medical and hygiene reasons, he says, for example for people suffering from eczema who are trying to avoid irritation caused when our natural skin bacteria multiply inside our clothing. It’s also important for people’s self-esteem “to not feel embarrassed about their clothes because they’re dirty or smelly” […]
The best approach, it seems, is to be flexible. “If your clothes don’t smell, then don’t bother [washing them],” advises Sumner. “And when you’re going to wash them, be clear about what to do to get the garment clean, but in the most effective way.” Wash things on lower temperatures, he suggests, or do a really short refresh cycle without any washing powder at all.
Day: 30 May 2023
After buying a new Philips Sonicare toothbrush I was surprised to see that it reacts to the insertion of a brush head by blinking an LED. A quick online search reveals that the head communicates with the toothbrush handle to remind you when it’s time to buy a new one.
Looking at the base of the head shows that it contains an antenna and a tiny black box that is presumably an IC. The next hint can be found in the manual where it says that: “Radio Equipment in this product operates at 13.56 MHz”, which would indicate that it is an NFC tag. And indeed when holding the brush head to my phone it opens a link to a product page: https://www.usa.philips.com/c-m-pe/toothbrush-heads.
Tesla has failed to adequately protect data from customers, employees and business partners and has received thousands of customer complaints regarding the carmaker’s driver assistance system, Germany’s Handelsblatt has reported, citing 100 gigabytes of confidential data leaked by a whistleblower.