Airing Our (Carbon) Dirty Laundry. By Kevin O'Connor, Times Argus (Montpelier, VT), June 22, 2008. "Back in 1995, [Alexander] Lee was student leader of Middlebury College's Environmental Quality club. Worried about the ecological impact of Vermont's two main electrical sources -- Hydro-Quebec dams up in Canada and the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant down in Vernon -- he invited anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott to give a speech that, to his surprise, would change his life. 'If we all did things like hang out our clothes,' Caldicott said in one fateful sentence, 'we could shut down the nuclear industry.' That got Lee thinking. One dryer, he knows today, eats up to $100 or more in power each year while emitting up to a ton of carbon dioxide. Collectively, America's more than 80 million dryers annually burn 6 to 10% of all residential electricity -- second only to refrigerators and the equivalent of 30 million tons of coal or the output of the nation's 15 least productive nuclear reactors... Aiming to change attitudes and laws, Lee founded Project Laundry List. What began as a college campaign to promote clotheslines has grown into an internationally known nonprofit organization."
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