Today marks our final in a series of posts dedicated to saving cash while keeping the environment in mind.  (Check here, here, and here for some great frugal blog resources to support your money saving efforts.)  Over the past two years we’ve written dozens of posts on budget friendly, earth friendly practices, but we’ve picked our favorites to help you save money in 2010.

• Did you know that there’s one brand of high quality, name brand green laundry soap that’s far cheaper than even generics? Check this post to see how you can save money and the planet while tossing those yam-encrusted baby bibs into the wash.
• You can save hundreds of dollars by making homemade organic baby food, cloth diapering and breastfeeding.  All of these options are better for baby,  the environment and your budget.
• Should you register for brand new baby duds or hit yard sales for gently used garments?  You can probably guess which one we recommend!
• Why take the time and energy to cut back on family spending anyway?  Is it worth it?  Absolutely!  We explore the long term rewards of under indulgence for your family (and your child!) here.
• If you’d like to save over a thousand dollars to tuck into the college fund, you might want to start before your baby ever arrives.  Opt for secondhand duds for your maternity months and postpartum transition wardrobe.
• Does shopping organic mean that you’ll need to shell out hundreds of dollars on a weekly basis?  Not necessarily.  In fact, Rebecca feeds her entire family eat wholesome organic foods on a shoestring budget without too much effort.  Learn how she does it here.
• Those of us living without dishwashers use far more water and soap than our Maytag-owning peers.  What are some simple ways to save water and conserve suds?  Rebecca takes a careful look at the problem here.

Does all that penny pinching add up?  You’ll be happy to know that because of all that careful thrift, Rebecca just graduated into the dishwasher-owner category after an arduous kitchen remodel.  I am still dreaming of slipping my peanut butter covered spoons into the silverware slot of my newfangled Maytag someday, but for now I shall make good use of Rebecca’s dishwashing research!

Breaking news: one year and three months after writing this cost-comparison of eco-friendly laundry detergents, I’m still using my Biokleen laundry detergent. I think I got my money’s worth out of that old ten-pound box. In that post, I discovered that Biokleen was actually cheaper than even conventional cheap detergent, especially with a high-efficiency machine.

 My child’s diaper days are now behind me, but I used the Biokleen powder on both pocket diapers and prefold diapers and never had a problem with residues or detergent build-up. (Read Joy’s post about diaper-friendly detergents here.) I also like the detergent for all of our other clothes. My only complaint is that the powder didn’t dissolve completely if I put it in the detergent compartment of my front-loading machine. I took care of that problem by putting the powder straight in the machine over my laundry.

I just noticed that the Biokleen is on sale for just $11.00 (that’s less than $.07 a load!) at Fred Meyer’s right now, so I may just have to pick up two more boxes, which will last me more than two-and-a-half years. At that point I will have to report back with yet another exciting “laundry update.” Stay tuned!

Having  our first child was a completely humbling experience.  My husband and I, two normally competent people, found ourselves up to our elbows in parenthood and more exhausted than we ever knew we could be.  Now with our second we know it’s possible to be even more bedraggled and groggy.

It’s so hard to manage a newborn and an almost three year old!  Our little one needs to be held ninety percent of the time while our older son is struggling for attention and challenging his limits.  In the midst of this happy/crazy drama, cloth diapers need to be washed, the compost needs to go out and the garden has to be watered.

We have a ridiculous amount of support.  My husband is home with me this summer and my son still goes to daycare since we have already paid for it through September.  Yet even with all this help, I can’t believe how tired we are!  How do some of you manage to single handedly manage a green lifestyle and caring for multiple children?  How did people do it years ago when their spouses didn’t help?  How do single parents do it?  Once again, I find myself smack in the middle of a fresh batch of humility.  Kudos to all of you who don’t get applause for the heroic feats you manage on a daily basis!

With the sun shining and temperatures soaring, there’s really no reason to use the dryer.  Sure, it can be somewhat of a hassle to work hanging your wet clothes on the line into your schedule, but think about the advantages!

• You’ll save about $.50 a load when you let the sun and air do the work instead of your dryer. If you wash a load every day (about average for a family of four), you’ll save $182.00 a year!
• Every load you toss in the dryer emits around one to five pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. Hanging dry, on the other hand, doesn’t harm the planet a bit.
• If you set out stained diapers in the sun, stains will disappear–without the use of any toxic chemicals.
• In super-hot weather, clothes will dry faster on the line than in the dryer!

So get out those dryer racks or set up a clothesline. Hanging even one load a week will make a difference!

(Look here for all of our laundry posts.)

Have you ever pulled supposedly clean diapers out of the washer only to find that they’re nearly as stinky as when they went in?  What’s the problem?  It could be a variety of factors including the iron content in your water, the laundry soap you’re using, or synthetic fabrics. 

The other day I stumbled across an amazing solution: hydrogen peroxide!  It turns out that plain old hydrogen peroxide will provide you with your own homemade version of non-chlorine bleach. 

For the wash: Add a quarter cup of hydrogen peroxide to each           washload or a bit more for very full or dirty loads.  

 For stains: douse them with peroxide and then spot wash with         detergent. It’s best not to let the peroxide sit on the fabric for a long period of time.

 For household use:  Just add 1/2 cup hydrogen peroxide to one gallon of water and use on kitchen sink, tile, bathroom, shower, toilet and bathtub.  

You can toss this mixture into a load of dirty diapers and find that it will make a big difference in smell.  

While chlorinated bleach hurts the environment, breaks down your diapers, and is potentially toxic, hydrogen peroxide is perfectly safe to use on cloth diapers.  In fact, the manufacturer of Bummi’s recommends using hydrogen peroxide to battle smells in stinky diapers.  It neutralizes the acidity, which is the cause of the smell.  While some people have found that vinegar works, it can exacerbate the problem since it’s also highly acidic.  

Thanks for joining us for Thrifty Green Thursday.  If you’d like to join us this week, click here to learn how to jump right in.   If you had your link deleted last week, it’s because you forgot to link back to this post.  We’d love to have you join us again this week!  We hope you can share some frugal, eco-friendly tips with our readers and benefit from all the wisdom of our ingenious contributors.

Mildew is my nemesis, but I much prefer it to the fumes of chlorinated bleach. Even though chlorine is very hard on the environment and our health, it’s found in a wide variety of household cleaners—all of which I’ve now replaced with homemade versions.  The one hurdle we hadn’t quite overcome was bleach. So the last time we desperately needed to clean out the shower I asked my husband to purchase chlorine-free bleach to save the environment and my nose.

When we read the label on the container we were a bit shocked.  The ingredients were simply hydrogen peroxide and water.  Why then did we pay too much when we could have made it ourselves? 

If you’d like to skip our expensive mistake, just follow the simple directions below. 

• For the wash: Add a quarter cup of hydrogen peroxide to each washload or a bit more for very full or dirty loads.  
• For stains: douse them with peroxide and then spot wash with detergent. It’s best not to let the peroxide sit on the fabric for a long period of time.
• For household use:  Just add 1/2 cup hydrogen peroxide to one gallon of water and use on kitchen sink, tile, bathroom, shower, toilet and bathtub.  

This mixture isn’t officially considered a disinfectant, but it will clean wonderfully.  Enjoy!

If you have a simple budget-friendly, eco-friendly tip we hope you’ll join us this week.  Read here to learn how to jump right in and add a link to your themed blog post.  Also, please read each other’s blogs and comment.  It makes it more fun for everyone!

People are often shocked by cloth diapers, but as we’ve learned firsthand, it’s really no big whoop to wash diapers yourself.  We are impressed, however, by the families who cart their diaper laundry to coin operated machines a few times a week.  If you are just such a family, we’d like to know how you do it.  Rebecca wrote a post on washing diapers in public machines here, but we’d appreciate even more input.  Did you spend a lot of money on laundry?  Are there machines in your building or do you have to travel to a Laundromat?  Have you gotten any negative or positive responses from other Laundromat customers or building tenants?  Would you recommend it to someone else?  Thanks for sharing your experiences and wisdom with our readers!

In the early days of the Green Baby Guide, I admitted to some baby “rules” I violate to save the planet.  One of them is separating baby clothes from the rest of the laundry–a guideline I heard during our childbirth class and read in various baby books and websites.   I am not sure what the reasoning behind that bit of advice is; certainly if someone in the house has a contagious illness there are easier ways to catch it than wearing clothes that have been washed in the same load.

The average family of four does more than seven loads of laundry a week.  Many people wash even more than that, according to the answers to this Yahoo question.  We (three of us) don’t do any more than three–maybe four–loads a week, and that includes diaper laundry! (We also use cloth napkins and dish towels instead of paper towels.)   Reducing the amount of laundry you do can save thousands of gallons of water, not to mention electricity.  If you have a 40 gallon top-loading machine and wash a load a day, you’re using over 14,000 gallons of water to wash your clothes every year!  Tumble drying all those clothes could release as much as 1,825 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere in a year’s time, depending on where you live.

So how can you cut down on laundry?  Here are three ideas:

• 1. Don’t be so obsessive about cleanliness. Re-wear clothes and re-use towels until they’re actually dirty. It’s okay to change sheets no more than once a year. (Just kidding on that last one.)
• 2. Wash full loads. A load is full when it’s filled to the top with clothes without stuffing them in.
• 3. Don’t sort clothes. If you have trouble making full loads all in one color/fabric type, try combining them. (Make sure to wash in cold water so your whites don’t turn pink.) I do separate clothes by color, which means I wash whites much less frequently than darks, since we prefer darker clothes.

Doing much less laundry works for me.  (For more Works for Me Wednesday tips, check out Rocks in My Dryer.)  How many loads of laundry do you wash per week?   Any more tips for reducing the amount you do?

More Green Baby Guide laundry posts:

Offsetting Water Used to Wash Cloth Diapers

Line Drying Trouble-shooting

Using a Drying Rack to Fight Global Warming

Washing Cloth Diapers in an Apartment: Eco-friendly or Totally Nuts?

Save Energy, Money, and Water with a Front-loading Washing Machine

The Cheapest Eco-friendly Laundry Detergent

Green Breakthrough: Save Energy by Washing Cloth Diapers in Cold Water

Finding Diaper-friendly, Earth-friendly Detergent

Washable vs. Disposable: Environmental Debates to Ponder

I often hear people say that cloth diapers are no better for the planet than disposables because of all the water used to wash them.  This argument has never made too much sense to me.  Water is a renewable resource, but the trees cut down to make disposable diapers are often harvested unsustainably.  The plastic used on each diaper is a petroleum product-definitely not a renewable resource.  Then there’s the whole landfill issue. . . .

Not to say that I don’t care about wasting water.  If you wash diapers every other day in a top loader, you’ll use a whopping 7,200 gallons water a year.  Do you use a wet pail to soak your diapers?  That’s 360 more gallons a year, for a grand total of 7,560.  The good news is, it’s not necessary to blow through that much water.  I estimate that I use under 1,200 gallons water a year washing diapers.  I have a front loader that uses 12.4 gallons per wash, and I wash diapers every four days instead of every other day.

I came up with the brilliant idea of “offsetting” the amount of water I use to wash diapers.  The concept is simple: you try to make up for an environmental sin by doing a good deed for the planet.  (Disclaimer: I realize that this whole “offsetting” concept is suspect, and we should all be doing the most to conserve resources at all times.)  The first step in my personal water offsetting mission is to use as little water as possible on laundry.  It would be difficult to offset 7,560 gallons of water a year, but by practicing just a few extra water conservation techniques, I can easily offset the 1,200 gallons I use.

Of course there are dozens of ways to reduce water waste.  I was surprised to find that my first two water-saving ideas conserved more than enough water to make up for my diaper-laundry water. 

1. Double up your toilet flushes.  The average person flushes eight times day.  At 1.6 gallons per flush, that equals 12.8 gallons a day.  Double up just one flush and you’ll save 584 gallons a year.  That’s almost half the amount of water I’d use washing diapers already.

2. Reduce showering time.  I am guilty of wasteful showering.  The average shower uses 2.5 gallons of water a minute.  A ten minute shower uses twenty-five gallons of water.  If two adults each take ten-minute showers and reduce them to five-minute showers (or shower every other day), they could save twenty-five gallons a day, or 9,125 gallons a year!  Now I’ve more than offset the amount of water used to wash diapers.  It’s interesting to note that two adults taking daily 10-minute showers are using fifteen times the amount of water needed to wash a year’s worth of diaper laundry.

Does anyone else feel guilty for washing cloth diapers in water?  How do you assuage your guilt?  Any crazy water-saving ideas you care to share with us?  Please tell!

Yesterday, Joy wrote  about saving money and reducing carbon emissions by line drying clothes.  I lived without a dryer for three years, which forced me to hang all my clothes on a big indoor rack, over the radiator, or out on the balcony.  Later, I lived in an apartment with coin-operated dryers, but I was so used to line-drying that I continued doing it.  Then, after about five solid years of dryer abstinence,  I started using the dryer again.  I felt guilty about it, but it was just so much easier, especially in during those nine rainy months of the year.

So why do people give up on line-drying?  Here are some of the biggest line-drying problems you may encounter–and how to solve them.

1. Problem: Your homeowners’ association or neighborhood association does not allow clotheslines.

Solution:  This could be an issue to raise at a meeting.  With more people striving to go green, the “unsightliness” of laundry lines may seem less important than the hole in the ozone layer.  Alternately, you could dry your clothes on a rack indoors.

2. Problem: Bugs get in your laundry.

Solution: Keep your clotheslines away from trees and bushes.  I admit that one reason I stopped drying clothes outside was because of the earwigs that climbed into my clothes and hung on for dear life.  They would not shake out, and that disgusted me!  I even tried setting my rack on a table, but they still managed to get in my clothes.  If anyone has a solution to this problem, please post a comment. 

3. Problem: It’s so humid, cold, or damp that your laundry never dries.

Solution: Unfortunately, drying your clothes indoors in the winter means that you are using more heat from your furnace to dry your clothes.  Still, doing this uses less energy than your dryer.  The average household does a load of laundry every day, so it’s not practical to leave one load hanging all over the house for a several days.   One idea is to let clothes air dry for a day, then toss them in the dryer to finish the job.  You’ll find they need a fraction of the normal time in the dryer once they’ve had a head start on the clothesline. 

4. Problem: Your laundry emerges stiff as a board from the clothesline.

Solution: A vinegar rinse can help soften line-dried clothes, as can some brisk shaking before hanging on the line.  In Europe, where almost everyone line-dries, they seem to iron all of their clothes.  Most Americans, on the other hand, are used to relying on the dryer to smooth out the wrinkles.  Ironing uses far less energy than the dryer–though obviously it also takes more time.  Again, you can throw the clothes in the dryer just before they dry.  Or add a wet towel to a load of air-dried clothes.  After just about five minutes, they will soften up. 

5. Problem: There is nowhere to hang your laundry.

Solution: Look into some of the clothes-drying racks that make a good use of space.  This one lowers from the ceiling, and this one retracts against the wall when you’re done using it.

6. Problem: It takes too much time to hang the laundry and then wait for it to dry.

Solution: Back when I was a line-drying purist, I scoffed at this excuse.  I have to admit, though, that there’s some merit to it.  It takes me over fifteen minutes to hang a load of laundry.  If you do a load of laundry a day (which I don’t), that would add 105 minutes to your laundry time each week.  In the summer, I’ve found that laundry dries just as fast on the line as it does in the dryer.  In the winter, it can take over a week to dry on the line (see #3), which may not work for some people.   Joy is a much fast clothes-hanger than I am, taking just seven minutes to hang a load.  And remember it’s not all or nothing–even hanging one load out to dry each week will make a difference! 

For someone who is trying to promote line-drying, I sound very negative!  Whenever I am grumbling about line-drying  my clothes, I just remember how much energy and money I’m saving.  That’s motivation enough for me!   Despite my laundry woes, I  also love line-drying for all the reasons Joy enumerated in yesterday’s post.  Please, everyone, post your line-drying tips and suggestions so I no longer have any reason to resort to my electricity-guzzling dryer!