If everyone in the U.S. line dried 50 percent of their clothes, total U.S. carbon emissions would be reduced by 0.4 percent

Clothes dryers are a significant source of energy use in U.S. homes. And they don’t need to be; a lot of times clothes can be dried on a line or a drying rack. Assuming you and all your neighbors and their neighbors (and on…and on…) made the switch, we’d save millions of tons of pollution. Plus, our clothes would last longer, and we’d all be less likely to accidentally shrink our favorite t-shirts.

Volunteers hang donated clothes on what they hope will be a three-mile-long clothesline in Murray, Utah. Photo by George Frey/Getty Images