I’ll FOGO the extra yard for the planet, but this French laundry plan stinks

A while ago, my local council – which has never met an environmental cause or a native tree it didn’t want to throw a parade for – rolled out its FOGO program in glorious technicolour. Personally, I thought they could’ve come up with something catchier than “Food Organics, Garden Organics”, but I guess telling ratepayers, “You know all the food scraps you currently throw in the red bin? Chuck them in the green bin instead, and we’ll collect them and turn them into shopping trolleys or whale sanctuaries or whatever”, was deemed too confusing.

The point is, for a while I was on board with the plan, merrily tipping the kids’ unwanted leftovers, stinking of tomato sauce and rejected broccoli, into the compostable bag and congratulating myself on my eco warrior credentials.

FOGO in your green bin is the latest frontier in the world of recycling.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Almost four years on, all the bins in the street have long endured trial by Christmas turkey bones, prawn shells and rotting chicken carcasses, and routinely require a hazmat suit and a titanium-lined constitution to clean. No self-respecting ibis would go anywhere near them, and I’m reasonably confident a passing possum was once overcome by the post-garbage day fumes and wandered, dazed, into traffic, where it was collected by a passing Tesla.

Saving the environment is often a messy, faintly disgusting business that no amount of industrial cleaner will ever render spotless. Just ask the French, who have spent the past fortnight enduring a crisis of conscience and laundry. The outcry is the result of a potent mix of a nation’s worth of festering gym clothes, an ecological agency, a load of cranky politicians and a spin cycle. Or in this case, no spin cycle. Mon dieu, let’s back up a bit.

The stink started when the French government-backed Agency for Ecological Transition (known as ADEME) released guidelines outlining how often certain garments required laundering. Its ultimate goal, presumably, was to force people to consider the fact that washing machines worldwide are responsible for producing around 62 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases. Over-washing also releases harmful microfibres into the environment and causes clothes to wear out more quickly. So far, so destructive, non?

A French government agency reckons we overwash our dirty clothes. But is it all just spin?Credit: Getty Images

Where ADEME became a-damned was when it turned troubleshooter, releasing a handy 16-page guide to how often individual items should be laundered. T-shirts, it said, could be worn five times before the sniff test should be deployed. Jeans should go 30 wears before walking themselves to the washing machine. Bedsheets? A week. Bras? Also, a week. And, most alarmingly, gym clothes should be worn on three separate (sweat-soaked, nauseating, revolting, fetid, ghastly, bacteria-breeding) occasions before being chucked in a bag and given a sea burial as a matter of some urgency (err, make that “placed in a washing machine with whatever the French equivalent of Cold Power is”).

Unsurprisingly, the guidance has resulted in a raft of choked gasps and upturned noses in France – and presumably those were owned by the people who were following the guidelines correctly. Many others echoed the sentiments of National Rally MP Frederic Falcon, who took aim at Ademe’s head Sylvain Waserman. “€10,000 a month [salary] and more than 1000 staff to produce such nonsense, financed with our taxes. The agency must be abolished urgently”, he wrote in a post on X.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable idea, speaking as someone who makes somewhat less than €10,000 a month and has somewhat fewer than 1000 staff. And before Waserman takes his leave, I would be interested in hearing what sort of a washing timeframe he’d put on my children’s school uniforms, which start their days clean, only to end them a sorry mix of breakfast cereal, dirt, felt pen, snot, more dirt, and at least four strands of foreign DNA. A fortnight, possibly? Hell, let’s throw caution to the wind and see what shape they’re in after a 10-week term. Maybe we can grow penicillin from a button.

And just when you thought matters couldn’t get any more feral, please welcome to the hot seat “self-professed gross girl Annabel Fenwick Elliott”, who weighed in on her washing habits in a lengthy piece for the Daily Mail, explaining that she is “not a fan of soap, hardly ever combs her hair, often forgets to brush her teeth and sometimes doesn’t shower for a week”. What any of that has to do with the ADEME guidelines is anyone’s guess, but she seems to be giving them a grimy thumbs-up. You do you, Annabel.

In France, though, there is little solace to be had at the thought of sheltering under her whiffy, unrepentantly deodorant-free wing. Conservative politicians continue to push for ADEME to be defunded, citing its most recent advice as evidence of a stain on France’s international reputation. Others say the guidelines should be followed and that doing so will ensure the nation emerges with “squeaky-clean” environmental credentials. Either way, it will all come out in the wash, of course. As long as the machine is only turned on after the gym gear is on its third wear.

Michelle Cazzulino is a freelance writer.