Meanwhile, living in Japan, if you tell people you prefer to machine dry your clothes, they’ll tell you outright that it’s wasteful. The assumption is that it’s only used when rain makes it impossible.
In Spain the attitude is similar, but for different reasons.
Environmental consciousness is sadly low in general, but cult to fashion and looks is strong. Machine drying anything but towels and sheets would be considered shabby by most, as it damages clothes.
When I was looking for housing, I visited some really luxury apartments (that I could never afford, but visiting is free and I'm a curious person, so why not) and having a good place to line dry clothes was always seen as a boasting point, never associated to poverty in the slightest.
I remember reading somewhere where an author realized all that lint they collected from their dryer was a result of their clothes literally falling apart fiber by fiber. In other words all the mass of the lint didn't just spontaneously form breaking some conservation of mass law but came from the clothes shedding and abrading against each other.
On the Swedish west coast where it's often windy and sunny we typically line dry our laundry. We do have a machine dryer, but it's typically only really used when there's too much humidity in the air (which doesn't happen often) or it's raining. Line drying typically yields better and more even results in my experience, especially when it's breezy.
Most of the dryers I've seen there didn't have external vents, and were often combined with the washer. They were really lousy at drying. Do you think that's part of it?
