No, really — before you turn away in disgust, hear me out. First of all, there are many items that can be worn multiple times before you have to throw them in the wash (granted, this is assuming you don’t actually get them dirty, muddy, etc). These are items like pants, sweaters, jackets, towels, and those shirts you don’t really do anything in. If you find yourself washing these types of clothes every week, rethink your laundry habits! Of course there are some items that you can’t wear again (underwear and socks), but you can also avoid having to run these items through the washing machine quite so often as well.

First, since we’re here to talk about saving money, think about how much money you’re using on laundry. Let’s say you do laundry each week. If you have two loads of laundry to wash at $1.50/machine (that’s the price here, anyway), that’s $3 a week to wash your clothes. To dry, you’ve got another two loads at 25 cents for half an hour each, but the dryers don’t really get anything dry unless you go for an hour. That’s another dollar total for drying. $4 a week on laundry adds up to between $16-20/month on laundry. That doesn’t really sound like much, but for a whole year that’s $192-240 spent on laundry! That doesn’t count in the cost of detergent, dryer sheets, fabric softener, or anything else you use in your laundry. Think… if you only did laundry every other week, your costs have already been halved, and you’re already down to less than $120 a year on laundry instead of $240. That’s a pretty big difference.

Second, from an environmental standpoint, think about the effects of doing laundry. You’ve got the water used (and maybe you use hot water, which means you’re also using the energy to heat up the water), the energy it takes to run the machine, the heat and energy needed for the dryer, the chemicals in the detergent, softener, sheets, and whatever else you use, the plastic used for the detergent bottle, etc etc etc. You also have the effect of wearing out your clothes faster by washing them more frequently, which means you’ll need to buy new clothes, and that opens up a whole other can of worms.

So here are some things to think about with regard to doing laundry:

Do you have any other ideas or tips? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

About this Contributor: Maria Schwartzman is a senior computer science major with a Spanish minor at a small liberal arts school in Indiana. She’ll be writing a lot about how to save money by living a sustainable lifestyle! Check out her website and then follow her on Twitter.