Yes, my cotton shirts and pants are the problem. Yup.
I used to work for a company that made precast concrete parts. One of the things they made was the faux stone walls that go around some fancy neighborhoods. They are poured into a mold, and one side of the mold has a plastic insert for the stone pattern. The plastic inserts, which are larger than any piece of plastic in your house, are used to make one wall and then they are tossed. This is one small company, and it's an example of the plastic waste we don't see or even think about, while we are told that our clothes are being washed wrong.
Im bored at work, and you've given me a mathematical itch to scratch.
A quick search tells me that a liter of gasoline being burned emits 2.3 kg of CO2. Another quick search, after digging through a few weasel words, tells me a liter of jet fuel emits 3.16 kg of CO2 when burned.
I ride a motorcycle (975 Nightster for reference) to work most of the time, and it gets 100 km on 5 liters pretty easily. Riding to work and back is about 40 minutes, and a total distance of about 33 kilometers round trip.
For me to ride to work, I use ~1.65 liters of gasoline which works out to 3.8 kg of CO2.
A single four-hour flight on the aforementioned private jet is 2,320 liters of jet fuel, which is 7,331 kg of CO2. To offset that, I'd need to ride my bicycle or walk to work for 1,929 days or approximately 7 years.
It's not because "eww, worms" or "eww, fish". It's two things. The big thing is, I don't want to hurt some small animal like a worm or bait fish, just so that I can hurt some other animal by dragging them into an environment where they can't breathe. Oh, but the humane thing to do is toss them back? Imagine being pulled out of an airlock into the vacuum of space, photographed, measured, and then put back in the airlock? I don't need to do all of that to some critter just for fun. Which brings me to the second thing about fishing that I don't like : It's not fun. It's boring. It's so boring. Just stand here and hope a fish eventually bites.
There are washing machines without anything more complex than a switch in them. If you really had a "pile of disassembled washing machines" you'd know that.
My electric bill changed by less than $2 per month when I installed an "inefficient" washing machine. It was so little that I'm not sure the washer was the cause. That's $72 over a period of three years. The machine it replaced was just out of warranty and needed a $200 drain pump.
I have a lot of specifications stuck in my head from previous jobs. A fun one is that precast concrete bridge beams aren't just concrete and rebar. They typically have a bunch (20-30 or more depending on size) of 13 mm steel cables that are each under about 13,000 kg of tension. The cables are pulled to a specific tension in the concrete form, the concrete is poured around them, then the cables are cut at each end.
What's their stance on dogs that bark all night?
Because this guy shuts up between the hours of 7 pm and 6 am.