How to Clean Green – top tips

Go Green – Save money

You can make your own green cleaning products, quickly, safely and cheaply.  Any home made cleaning product can be made cheaper than any shop bought one.  For more information on making your own cleaning products, see Clean Green.

Use Green Products

As the health and environmental impacts of conventional cleaning products become more and more understood, new brands of green, and effective cleaning products have started hitting the market and competing for that coveted place in your cleaning supplies.

Many of these products are non-toxic, biodegradable, and made from renewable resources (not petroleum). But if shop bought products aren’t for you, home-mixed cleaners can get the job done just as well, if not better.

Vinegar and baking soda can be used to clean almost anything. Mix in a little warm water with either of these and you’ve got yourself a brilliant all-purpose cleaner.

Leave the toxins at the door

Imagine what’s on your shoes at the end of the day.

Bringing that oil, antifreeze, animal waste, particulate pollution, pollen, and who knows what else into the house is not very good news, especially for kids and pets that spend time on floor level.

Keep the outside out of your home with a good doormat or a shoeless house policy. Less dirt also means less sweeping, mopping, and vacuuming, which means less work, water, energy, and fewer chemicals.

Toss toxic shop bought cleaners carefully

When replacing your cleaning products, don’t just throw the old ones in the rubbish bin. If they’re too toxic for your home, they won’t be good for the drain or the landfill either!

Many communities have areas for recycling or recycling days and will take all of these off your hands. Throwing chemicals in your bin or down the drain means they might end up back in your water supply and come back to haunt you.

Help your home smell baking soda-tasty

Baking soda not only removes those strange smells coming from your fridge, it’s also a great odour-eliminator for your carpet, oven, microwaces and work surfaces.

On carpets, just sprinkle on a little baking soda to soak up some of those odours and then vacuum it up.

Be careful with antibacterial cleaners

The antibacterial ‘cleaners’ that many people think are necessary, especially during cold season, don’t clean hands better than soap and water, and also add to the risk of breeding “super germs” (bacteria that survive the chemical onslaught and have resistant offspring).

In the US, the FDA has found that antibacterial soaps and hand cleansers do not work better than regular soap and water, and should be avoided.