According to Green Homekeeping (Mango Publishing, 2018) with the gentle guidance of eco-expert, Alice Mary Alvrez, you can start with baby steps and progress to an advanced eco-warrior! Start with these inspired ideas and the 52 simple ways to reduce your waste, eat organic, and keep toxins out of your home. Inside this helpful and hopeful guide, you’ll find tips for greening up all the areas of your life. Learn surprising facts about your impact on the environment and change your habits with do-it-yourself ideas.
Keeping your home clean can actually be a pretty toxic experience if you use the typical chemical concoctions that are sold as cleaners these days.
Ingredients like ammonia and bleach are extremely harsh, and the fumes linger in your home long after you’ve done your cleaning. Many less pronounceable substances are mixed in for good measure (like maybe some dimethyl ethylbenzyl ammonium chloride or trisodium nitrilotriacetate), even though many have been linked to increased cancer rates. Not only do they affect the air quality in your home, these substances end up in the water supply. You can imagine what that will do to the environment.
All you really need around the house is vinegar, baking soda and salt. You can get vinegar at the grocery store in large jugs, and a bulk store should carry baking soda and salt in larger quantities. These three natural ingredients can create a variety of cleaning products that will keep your home clean without the noxious mess.
You may need to add a little elbow grease to get the same level of sparkling clean. Still, it’s a small price to pay to green up your home.
Need some anti-bacterial action? Well, vinegar usually helps kill any bacteria because of the acid, but it’s not very necessary. Our environment needs to have its usual compliment of microbes and we’re not any healthier by sterilizing all our home surfaces.
Best of all, you will save a lot of money by making your own. The ingredients are all very cheap and can replace so many products. Just think of what you’ll do with all that empty cabinet space once you’ve dumped a dozen bottles of commercial cleaners. And by “dumped” we mean that you have disposed of them properly at a waste disposal depot.
A good sink or tub cleaner can be made from:
- 1/4 cup of baking soda
- 1/2 cup of vinegar
Use a rag and scrub all your bathroom troubles away! If you really need more scrubbing power add a few pinches of table salt.
Excerpted fromGreen Homekeeping © 2018 by Alice Alvrez. Published by Mango Publishing.
