Four Homemade and Eco-friendly Cleaning Solutions

When cleaning your home it is important to consider all the effects of the cleaning products you choose to use, particularly their expense and safety. Chemical cleaners can be toxic as well as expensive, especially considering that they can all be made with household ingredients that your family would purchase anyway, for other uses. Many of the chemicals used to make common cleaning products are poisonous, and in a home that includes young children and pets, limited exposure to these chemicals is advisable. Look at the bottles of cleaning products you use in your home. There are “signal words” on the label that mean more than what they say. “Danger” means that the product is highly flammable, extremely corrosive or highly toxic. “Poison” means the product is highly toxic. “Warning” or “Caution” means the product can be flammable, corrosive or toxic, just to a lesser degree. By looking to what you already have at home, you can avoid both issues—save money while avoiding the use of harmful and toxic chemicals. Vinegar is perhaps the most versatile of any natural product. Made of weak acetic acids that are produced when sugar and starch ferment, vinegar is safe for consumption as well as removing dirt and grime. White vinegar, when undiluted, is great for killing weeds, ants, or repairing scratched CDs and DVDs. In the bathroom, white vinegar removes toilet and bathtub rings as well as soap stains. Diluted with warm water, vinegar in a spray bottle is great for cleaning stainless steel, windows and glass. Add it to the washing machine’s rinse cycle as a natural fabric softener, and mix it with baking soda and water to make a quick cleanser for almost any home surface. Baking soda, when mixed with vinegar and water, can remove grime from toilets, bathtubs, showers and kitchen grout. Peppermint oil can be added to make this mixture’s deodorant power even stronger. Rubbing alcohol from the medicine cabinet can also be mixed with vinegar as an evaporating cleaner for use on glass, light fixtures, and mirrors. Mix it in one-to-one parts with water and vinegar. Olive oil can be used to buff stainless steel kitchen appliances and furniture. When mixed with a half cup of lemon juice, olive oil shines and seals wood furniture and removes toxic chemical polishing products. Synthetic waxes and polishing products tend to have more dangerous chemicals than other cleaning products. By keeping chemical cleaning products out of the home, it will be easy to save money and keep your family safe from both germs and toxins. The earth will thank you, too—by sticking to products made from naturally occurring chemicals, you will keep dangerous synthetic ones out of groundwater, and then out of oceans, rivers and lakes. Phosphates, a popular ingredient in most detergent soaps, have polluted many water ecosystems by causing algae blooms that hog all of the nutrients and subsequently threaten other species. All in all, the choice seems obvious. To learn more about eco-friendly home cleaning practices, please visit ourDenver cleaning services website and click through to the blog.