9. Stop Buying Clothes That Need to Be Dry-Cleaned

Obviously, there are a number of occupations with dress codes requiring clothes that must be regularly dry-cleaned. If you’re an investment banker, you have to have your three-piece suits, which don’t respond well to being run through the washer and dryer. Fortunately, most of us in the 1990s no longer need to be slaves to the Dress for Success code that ruled the 1980s. From now on, at least until the Revolution, the code should be Dress for Comfort and Convenience, which means, for the most part, wash-and-wear cottons and natural fabrics.

I have a friend who argues that taking a load of clothes to the cleaners is much simpler than having to run a comparable amount of clothes through the laundry, and for some that may be true. It comes down to a life-style choice, and how simple you want your life to be. For years we made weekly trips to the dry cleaners to pick up the shirts and to drop off the week’s cleaning, and never gave it a second thought. Now that we’ve simplified our wardrobe, it’s much easier to avoid the dry cleaners. I love being able to run a load of clothes through the washer/dryer, hang them up, and know they’re ready to wear. And we take some satisfaction in knowing that we’ve reduced, even if only by a small fraction, the use of environmentally harmful dry-cleaning solvents.