I Never Throw Away Dryer Lint — I Use It for This Smart Hack Instead

Dryer lint is a pain. You have to remember to take it out of the dryer each time you toss in a load, and it inevitably seems to drop little pieces everywhere. Cleaning your dryer lint trap can be a nightmare. Up until now, I’d always tossed dryer lint directly in the trash — but then I discovered the many uses of dryer lint. 

As it turns out, dryer lint uses go far beyond getting caught in a filter. I’ve heard people say that it’s an incredible barrier against weeds in your garden, or that it could even be used to prevent drafts in your house. But the one dryer lint hack that took me by surprise and actually made me want to give it a try was to use it as a fire starter (it is flammable, after all). Here’s what happened when I put it to the test in a chiminea at my parents’ house.

Dryer lint is incredibly flammable because of both its material makeup and its texture. If you think about it, most textiles are flammable, and dryer lint is just a ball of whatever fabrics you’ve had in the dryer. It might have cotton, polyester, and rayon, and all of these small fabric particles come together in a cloud-like ball of lint. You combine the flammability of those materials with a light and airy texture that allows lots of oxygen in (fire loves oxygen!), and you have something that will ignite quickly and easily.  

Obviously, this is not something you want to occur in your home. But if you’re using it to start a fire, then you have an ideal situation. With a few matches or a lighter and dryer lint, you can easily start a fire that will then spread to the kindling and wood that surround it. 

Typically, you would use paper or a commercial fire starter to get a fire going. You would first ignite that starter and then add oxygen, and the kindling above it should catch. You go through the exact same process with dryer lint.

Take a ball of loosely gathered dryer lint (loose is key — you want oxygen to make its way in!), then add petroleum jelly to it. Petroleum jelly is like pouring gasoline on a fire. It helps the dryer lint catch when you introduce a fire source, then, as the dryer lint burns, it will spread to the kindling and wood in the fire pit or fireplace. I tried this method, and it really is that simple. I was afraid it might ignite too quickly, but it worked like any other starter. 

I spent a bit of time looking up tutorials online before I dove into trying this dryer lint fire starter hack, and I read that you need surprisingly little dryer lint. I used too little the first time, and had to go back for more. I also decided to take the simplest route possible, which is why I just added petroleum jelly to accelerate how quickly the lint would catch fire. If I were to do it again, I would try the toilet paper tube method. 

With the toilet paper tube, you still use the same lint and petroleum jelly, but it’s a more concentrated approach. Rather than simply using a wad of dryer lint with petroleum jelly, you loosely fill the tube with lint. The petroleum jelly goes on the lint on each end. You can toss them on the fire as-is, or you can roll them in wax paper, twisting each end like a piece of candy. This process makes for a more contained fire starter, and I think it would have made me feel safer going into the process. So I’ll try that next time with my solo stove! All in all, even without the toilet paper tube, this really did help the flames in the chiminea get started much faster — but with a few tweaks it could become a regular hack for me.