A Line in the Yard: The Battle Over the Right to Dry Outside

Rob and Laurie Cook are not prone to breaking the law, but these days they have been given to a regular act of civil disobedience: hanging their laundry to dry out in the backyard. The deed to their home — like most in this upscale suburb — prohibits outdoor clotheslines as eyesores.

Aurora is an upscale town where laundry is rarely public.

“I thought people passing by couldn’t see it, and the developers wouldn’t see it, so it didn’t bother my conscience too much,” said Mr. Cook, a retired businessman and former officer in the Canadian Air Force who is part of a citizens group trying to get the clothesline ban overturned, arguing that line drying is better for the environment.

“Using a dryer may have made sense 30 years ago when energy was cheap and we weren’t aware of global warming,” he said. “It doesn’t any more.”

The Cooks are part of a loose global network of people who are rallying around what they call the “right to dry.” While not necessarily abandoning the electric dryer, they are adding the clothesline and the drying rack to their stable of household appliances, or fighting for the right to do so.

Ontario is among a number of places that is considering striking down the clothesline bans that have been common in North America and parts of Europe, arguing that they are environmentally irresponsible. Laws seeking to overturn clothesline bans are now pending in Connecticut, Vermont and Colorado.

“If we can’t change simple stuff like this, we’ll never handle the big things we need to do for the planet,” said Aurora’s mayor, Phyllis Morris, who earlier this year petitioned Ontario’s government to declare clothesline bans an illegal “barrier to conservation” under provincial law. “People say, ‘Oh, Phyllis, you want to turn women back into the laundry lady,’ and I say wrong: This is about rights. It’s about the environment.”

Motivated by environmental concerns and skyrocketing energy costs, consumers like her and the Cooks are re-evaluating their drying habits. The British retailer ASDA said that in the first four months of 2007, the most recent period for which numbers were available, sales of clotheslines and washing lines rose 150 percent and sales of clothespins over 1,000 percent. Hills Industries of Australia, whose core product is drying racks, reported that revenues in its home division jumped 15 percent in 2007.