credit: martcatnoc – flickr
A recent opinion piece in the New Scientist, “‘Right to dry’ could wean Americans off consumption [1],” by Alexander Lee, talks about how much energy could be saved if we dried our clothes on a line rather than in a tumble dryer, and about the various property rules and regs that restrict or outright forbid clotheslines. Lee runs Project Laundry List [2], which estimates that dryers are responsible for 10 to 15 per cent of the energy consumed by U.S. households.
This reminded me that we reported [3] on Ontario’s ban of clothesline banning about a year and a half ago. At that time the relevant legislation was the captivatingly captioned Energy Conservation Leadership Act, 2006. That is now a dead letter, and the authority has been transferred to section 4 of the Green Energy Act, 2009 [4], in force since early last month.
Clotheslines now get their explicit protection under O. Reg. 97/08 [5] pursuant to the Green Energy Act. I’m going to set out here a bit of that statutory material because I find it interesting to see how it deals with such humble, domestic objects and practices.
1. The following are designated for the purposes of subsection 3 (1) [sic] of the Act:
- Clotheslines.
- Clothestrees.
- Any goods and technologies that have a purpose that is the same as a clothesline or clothestree, and no other purpose…
I wouldn’t have thought to mention “clothestrees,” but I can see that it makes sense. But what of that “and no other purpose” proviso? Would a bush become “designated” if I draped my shirt over it to dry, or does the bush have an “other purpose”? Does this fail to protect my balcony railing if I use it as a clothestree?
There’s probably not a lot in laundry law to support practitioners, even in these hard times. So questions like these will likely go unanswered, I fear.