Venture Capital Wanted for 'Green Laundry' Business

Remember that British kid who set up a web page and sold "ads" at $1 a pixel, trying to raise $1 million to fund his university education (and ensure he had beer money while he was there)? Stupidest idea in Internet history, right? His final tally was $1,037,100. No word on whether or not he bothered to go to university in the end.

Bringing me to my point.

Are you looking for somewhere smart to put the millions you pulled out of tech companies just before the last dotcom crash? Or a safe (and remunerative) haven for the proceeds from the Dubai and Singapore condominiums you managed to sell early last year, just before those markets went into cardiac arrest?

Yes? Do I have a business for you!

First off, it's a green business, meaning it's "eco-friendly", "sustainable", blah blah blah. The words that get people very, very excited these days (so excited they sometimes don't even ask to see cash flow projections, in case you're thinking of flipping your stake within 6-12 months).

Second, it's a business that will help support people in a developing country, a business that doesn't involve hiring retired Spetsnaz officers with fleets of Antonov cargo planes to extract conflict gold, diamonds and cellphone minerals from jungle airstrips at the business end of an AK-47.

The business? Hand-laundered, sun-dried eco-laundry. If you're reading this from a developed country that is not Japan (where mostly, laundry - including mine - is still air dried), chances are you clean your clothes in a washing machine and dry them in a clothes dryer. You probably throw some "fresh scent" fabric softener into either the washing machine or dryer, and you feel pretty good about yourself (or at least, about the way your clothes feel and smell). Good, that is, until you pause to consider the armageddon-inducing damage you're inflicting on the environment.

The ladies in the photos above work in a small Medecins Sans Frontieres-operated hospital in Kabizo, North Kivu, and take care of all the laundry for a medical facility that had 45 resident patients when I visited, and can accommodate more. The water they use (you can see the taps in the first photo) is purified in a nearby MSF-built water sanitation facility and pumped to a 15,000-liter storage bladder on the hospital grounds.

So many things that are automated or mechanized in our world, are done by hand in their world. Nearly everything, in fact.

Want to build a building? First, buy the wood, and a man will cut down a tree in the forest, rough cut it where it falls, truck it to your site, and cut it into lumber. All by hand, with two-man saws, hand saws, adzes and planes.

Want your laundry done? If you're a Congolese farmer or IDP refugee, you don't do laundry, or at least don't do it very often (and when you do, you're doing it in an unclean river or stream). If you have greater resources (as we do), you figure out how to get clean water (for MSF that means building a water sanitation facility, and almost certainly sharing it with the local community), and you do it by hand (more likely, you hire people to do it by hand for you).

Handcut lumber is already being exported from the Congo, almost certainly for the most part exploitatively rather than sustainably, but I reckon eco-laundry is The Next Big Thing.

Send money first, bags of laundry later.