Laundry day isn’t anybody’s favorite day of the week. On laundry day, every family member’s dirty clothes get piled into the hamper and then thrown into the wash together. Once it’s done, you take it all out and assume they’re clean now. However, just because they smell nicer and the stains are gone, doesn’t mean they’re any cleaner. In fact, your dirty clothes can actually come out of the wash dirtier than they were before.
Your Underwear Is Dirtier Than You Think
The main culprit behind dirty ‘clean’ laundry is underwear. Underwear comes into direct contact with our most intimate areas and are a breeding ground for germs. Any genital infection that you might have, gets transferred onto your underwear. Even worse, no matter how thoroughly you wipe, there’s always going to be traces of poop in your underwear. In fact, clean samples of underwear that were tested, were shown to have a tenth of a gram of fecal matter in all of them. Naturally, this number is much higher for children’s underwear.
This is concerning because most of us don’t separate our laundry before washing them. This means fecal matter and germs from underwear get thrown in with kitchen and hand towels. During the wash cycle, these germs spread to other laundry items, including those which come into direct contact with your hands and food. Even if you do wash your underwear separately, the germs get transferred onto the inside surfaces of the washing machine. A single wash cycle of just underwear will leave as much as 100 million E. coli in the tub, which will get transferred to the laundry items you wash next.
So How Do You Keep Your Laundry Clean?
Well for starters, relying on just detergent is not the answer. Think back to all the detergent ads you’ve ever seen. They promise to keep your clothes soft, to remove tough stains and to be gentle on fabric. One claim they fail to make is to kill germs on your clothes. This is because detergents have almost no effect on germs. Using ineffective detergents plus low temperature water only exacerbates the problem.
The only solution to preventing transfer of germs in your laundry is to use hot water and bleach. Water needs to be heated to 150 degrees to be able to kill germs. Anything lower and you’re just giving the germs a warm shower instead of killing them. While bleach does kill germs, it can be very rough on certain clothes. Avoid using bleach on delicate lingerie and on colored clothes because they will bleach them to a lighter color. You can however use it to kill germs before they get transferred onto other clothes. After you run a load of just your underwear, add some bleach to the washing machine and complete one wash cycle with just water and no clothes. This will kill any bacteria inside the tub before they can attach themselves to anything else.
Another way to sanitize your clothes is to just hang them to dry in the sun. Ultraviolet rays from the sun kill any germs on your clothes, making them safer to wear. When it comes to drying your clothes next time, ditch the dryer for the natural sun. Dryers contain millions of germs which automatically get transferred onto fresh batches of clean laundry. So hang up that clothesline and dry your clothes naturally like your ancestors did before you.
Precautions To Take
Apart from this, there are many other steps you can take to ensure your clothes don’t get dirtier in the laundry. To make sure kitchen towels and hand towels don’t come into contact with these germs, wash them separately. Also make sure you wash underwear separately so that there’s no chance of germ transmission. Children’s clothes tend to have more germs on them that regular ones, so try not to mix them up with your towels. If you’ve gotten blood, vomit or feces on some of your clothes, first rinse of the matter and then wash it separately with bleach. If you work in a hospital, with children or with sick people, you need to wash your clothes with bleach each time.
