Rewriting those hotel towel-use cards to let guests know that a majority of hotel guests do, in fact, opt to reuse their towels.

An experiment adding the true fact that a majority of hotel guests opt to reuse their towels got 34% more guests to reuse.

Don't just guilt-trip us about the environment. Exert peer pressure. When I'm naked in that hotel bathroom deciding how to communicate with the maids in the language of towel signaling — rehang = reuse, drop on the floor = do the laundry — am I more influenced by the morality of planet-saving or the desire to be like other people? To tell you the truth, I'm most influenced by the fact that I'm paying for clean towels.

The link goes to an article that's mostly about trying to get people to quit using dryers altogether and switch to line-drying. Do you hang your clothes out to dry? If not, what would it take to get you to line-dry? Do you want your neighbors hanging their clothes outside?

When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, my family did not have a clothes dryer, and we disapproved of women who used dryers. (Only women did the laundry.) It had absolutely nothing to do with protecting the environment. It was solely about how fresh and clean we expected the laundry to be. Resorting to a dryer was considered a bit slovenly. Slatternly.

But I would never hang laundry outdoors today. Quite aside from the fact that I live on a wooded lot, and there are always squirrels running across the branches knocking vegetable matter into the air, I wouldn't want every passerby to see what things I've laundered. Yes, it could be considered aesthetically pleasing if there were lots of flat white sheets and towels and big white shirts, but what are you going to do? Cull through your washings and find the things that look spiffy hanging in the breeze and the smaller/more intimate items you'll have to drape over indoor racks?