Inspired by Citizen Green’s excellent tips for hanging clothes to dry, and committed more than ever to saving energy after seeing The Age of Stupid last week, I was determined to figure out a way to hang dry at least some of our clothes. The trouble is, we don’t have a yard for installing the kind of contraption Linda has, and we don’t have room in the house to put one up either. Our laundry room is basically the back hallway which has barely enough room for Michael and me to squeeze past each other. We also don’t have the right kind of wall space to put up one of those expanding dry racks.
So I was happy to find a link to a different kind of drying rack in one of the comments on Linda’s post. Called the Best Drying Rack, the unit is constructed of maple and corrosion resistant steel and is advertised as having “(no plastic parts).”
I’m always interested in companies that not only avoid adding plastic to their products but also see the wisdom in advertising that fact. So I asked the owner, Greg Baka, about that decision. His response:
I designed our Drying Rack to not have plastic parts after noticing that
1) plastic parts always break first, and
2) the antique racks I was basing my design on had no plastics
And in fact, the design is pretty ingenious.
The unit is basically held together by physics. No nails, screws or hinges except for a bolt in the top and bottom. Oh, and a tiny bit of Elmer’s Heavy Duty glue stick. Everything else slides and stays in place via gravity and friction, like the Mormon Tabernacle. And each drying arm moves on its own, so the unit can take up more or less space, depending on what is needed. It also retracts for convenient storage in our narrow hallway.
But what about the packaging? I asked Greg about the packaging, and he admitted that he does enclose the rack in plastic (bag, stretchwrap, tape) to protect it.
Beth Terry writes about finding alternatives to plastic and tracks her own plastic consumption and plastic waste at www.FakePlasticFish.com. Why Fake Plastic Fish? "Because if we don't solve our plastic problem, they could be the only kind of fish we have left." Please stop by and leave a comment!
