Chris’ USA Tour 2006/2007

Maybe it would be a good time right now to explain why ‘Powered by Unilever’ is written in the upper right hand of the screen. And where better to start than at the point of my decision to make the trip that I’m on right now for over more than a month. Of course, this decision meant the end of my productive period at Unilever, at least for a year. So I felt that it would be a courteous move to my manager to tell in time about my plans so that he could take the required measures. Completely unexpected this measure turned out to be a sponsorship for my trip. Without falling into too much detail my counterfit would be to sketch an image of the Americans and their laundry washing habits. The reason for this is that I work for a department that is called Consumer Technical Insights, a department which main objective is to determine how people do their laundry and why they do it that way, with a final goal of generating ideas for improving laundry products. And I’m in the ideal position for determining the laundry habits of the American people because of my bicycle trip.

What I find most striking is that even though most of the houses in the rural area of the United States are positioned alongside the street and with the garden around the house providing the possibility of seeing just about everything around the house, that in the month that I have been cycling I’ve only once seen the wash hanging outside to dry. And since the sun has been shining quite strongly for the last month the laundry actually would have seem to dry quicker outside of the house than in a drier.

Because I can hardly imagine a person hanging the laundry to dry inside the house when you have the ideal possibility of drying outside under the warm sunny sky, I strongly suspect the American consumer to almost always use the drier. Out of habit. The fact that the average American has no idea about how many energy he consumes compared to the rest of the world (22% of the world total), the amount of plastic bags I’m able to collect in just a week together with the fact that just about all transportation (except for the big cities) seems to happen by car only strengthens this suspicion.

Sustainable production, the ability to provide for the needs of the world’s current population without damaging the ability of future generations to provide for themselves seems to be as far from the average consumer as space travel. And to bring this back again to the laundry, why would you hang your wash to dry in the sun when it’s much easier to take the laundry out of one porthole to subsequently put it in another and let the machine do the work?

The step from energy via economie to political interest almost begs for to be made, but somehow I feel that it will be impossible for my to add information and still be interesting at the same time. So I’m taking my fingers away from the keyboard and wish everybody a pleasurable laundry fragrance.