how to sort clothes

Knowing how to sort laundry is critical to keeping clothes looking their best. Plus, proper sorting keeps us from being forced to wear pink clothing because the red sock got in with the whites.

The key to sorting clothes is to balance two competing needs:  to do as few loads of wash as possible, versus to wash everything individually for the least wear and tear. Neither extreme is optimal. Laundry with no sorting results in dingy-looking clothes that have shrunk or faded. Washing everything separately wastes time, energy, and the Earth's resources.

Criteria for Laundry Sorting

When striking the right balance consider the following criteria for each item of clothing:

1. How it should be washed. Determine what water temperature and washing machine cycle the item should be washed in, or if it should be hand-washed. When in doubt check the laundry symbols on the tag. Also, consider embellishments on each item, such as bows, lace, and buckles, and how they may affect or harm other items, with regard to tearing, snagging, and linting, for example. Make sure all clothing items can safely be laundered together.

2. Color. Washing like colors with like reduces the chance of dinginess and bleeding. Even colorfast items, over time, bleed a little. The results may not show up right away, but there is a cumulative effect. The main color piles include bleachable whites, lights, brights and darks. Any non-colorfast items (those that bleed dye excessively) should be washed separately.

3. Stains. You can generally pre-treat stained items and then throw them in the pile of wash. However, some clothing is so dirty it needs to be washed separately, such as a diaper blow-out, or greasy or excessively muddy clothes. Wash these things separately to prevent the dirt or other yuck from re-depositing on other items.

4. Like items together. Wash towels, bed linens, and kitchen towels all in their own separate loads. Further, wash paired socks and the top and bottom of outfits that match in the same load, to prevent uneven fading.

What to do When Colors Bleed in the Wash

As mentioned above, wash all non-colorfast items separately. To know which items may not be colorfast, read your care tags for the warnings of "wash with like colors" or "wash separately." Watch out mostly for denim, fluorescent clothing and natural dyes. Further, wash new towels and bright-colored clothing separately for a couple of loads until excess dye is washed out.

What do you do when something sneaks into your load and bleeds onto other clothes? First, don't place the items in the dryer, because this can set the dye stain. Instead, remove the bleeding item and then rewash everything else in hot water with strong detergent and either chlorine bleach, if safe for the fabric, or color-safe bleach, if not. If dye remains, soak the clothing in a solution of color-safe bleach and water for a couple of hours. If that doesn't work, the dye stain may be permanent.

If you've ruined white clothing you can also try a commercial product called color run remover, such as Carbona color run remover or Rit color remover. These types of products are designed to remove all dye from fabric so it can't be used on colored fabrics, only whites, but for pink underwear they can be pretty effective for restoring them to white again.

So what do you do when your white t-shirt turns pink in the wash? Do you throw it away, wear it anyway or try to reverse the color bleed? If the latter, how do you do it?