Complete guide to laundry green cleaning

For this, you just need one amazing ingredient: sodium percarbonate, the active oxygen ingredient used in many commercial laundry soakers and oxygen bleaches. When it dissolves in water it releases oxygen that helps break down coloured stain molecules and organic build-up. It works on whites and colours, and it lifts yellowing from sheets and pillowcases.

When it comes to specific stains, there are so many types, and so many fabrics they land on, that the solutions are wide and varied. But a few golden rules hold every time:

No two loads are the same. There's the kids' school gear, full of sweat, whatever they had for lunch, grass, dirt, and things you'd rather not identify. There's workwear, gym gear, towels, and the load that barely needs anything.

So this section stays general. It's the higher-level view of how washing works, and how to handle your normal everyday loads: the jeans, the shirts, the towels, the things that can take a proper wash. Delicates are a different story, and they get their own section further down.

A good laundry powder or liquid does a few jobs at once. Surfactants lift the dirt and body oils off the fabric, alkaline builders raise the pH so everything works harder, and together they hold it all in the water so it rinses away instead of settling back into your clothes.

But the product can only do so much. Three things decide how well the wash performs:

Stiff, scratchy laundry is usually not a softness problem. It is a residue problem. Leftover commercial detergent (if you're still using it), soap and hard-water minerals build up in the fibres and leave them feeling rough, even when the clothes are clean.

The fix is a rinse made with citric acid, not a coating that sits on top of the fabric. It works by neutralising alkaline soap and detergent residue, dissolving hard-water minerals, and letting the fabric come out soft on its own.

Use it in the rinse cycle, on its own, not mixed into the wash. Acid and soap cancel each other out, so stirring citric acid through your powder would simply undo both. Keeping them in separate steps is what lets each one do its job. Add a few drops of essential oil to the rinse if you want a light fragrance, or leave it out entirely.

Drying is really two jobs: get the water out, then get the clothes dry without wrecking the fabric doing it.

Start with the water. A good spin does most of the work, so if a load comes out sopping, run it through an extra spin before it goes anywhere. Give everything a shake as it comes out too. It knocks out the creases and helps things dry in shape rather than in a crumpled heap.

Then it's a choice between the line and the dryer. The line wins on most counts. It's free, it's gentle on fabric, and the sun naturally brightens whites and freshens as it goes. Drying inside works too, you just need airflow, an open window or a dehumidifier, so damp doesn't linger and turn into that musty smell (or worse, mould).

The dryer earns its place when you're short on time or short on sun, and in a city like Melbourne, where four seasons in one day is a real forecast, that's most of the year. It's fast and it softens things up nicely, but the heat is hard on wool, activewear and anything with stretch, so keep those off it.

If you're using the dryer, a few habits make it behave: clean the lint filter every single load, no exceptions, don't cram the drum, and try not to mix heavy towels and jeans in with light shirts, or the shirts bake dry while everything else is still damp.

The safe method is a mild soap solution rather than an alkaline powder or an oxygen soak. Liquid castile soap works well here because you can dilute it to the gentlest possible strength while still cleaning properly. Fill a basin with lukewarm water, add a small amount of castile soap, and submerge the item. Press the water through gently rather than rubbing or agitating — wool's scaled fibre structure locks together permanently under heat and friction, which is what causes felting and shrinkage in the machine.

Rinse thoroughly in cold water until it runs clear, then press out the excess without wringing and lay flat to dry. Wool is also naturally odour- and dirt-resistant, so airing garments out between wears often means you need to wash far less often than you'd think.

If a piece has lost its water resistance or bounce over time, that's usually the wool's natural lanolin wearing away with washing. Re-lanolising is an easy occasional fix for wool that's lost its bounce, and it's covered in full in the recipe below.

Wool isn't the only fabric that needs a gentler hand. Silk fibres are delicate and can water-spot or lose their sheen under harsh alkaline powders, so the same mild castile soap wash used for wool works well here too — always in cool water, with a gentle press rather than any wringing.

Lace and other openwork fabrics are more about handling than chemistry. The fine threads snag and pull easily, so support the piece fully in the water rather than lifting it by one section, and use a mesh laundry bag if it ever needs a delicate machine cycle. As with wool, check the care label first, test an inconspicuous area, and when in doubt, treat it as hand-wash only.

It helps to separate three different things, because they have three different fixes.