Help Your Wallet and the Environment With These 5 Cleaning Ideas
Cleaning up your living space is a challenge that presents itself daily, and not everyone has the strength to fight the battle that often. Laundry, dirty dishes, trash — it all adds up and clutters your home with junk. It’s easy to look at a small mess and think you can clean it up quickly, so why not do it later? Then when you check back later, the mess has doubled or tripled in size. It can be discouraging!
While you’re at the store getting groceries, you’ll pass cleaning products that claim they’ll help get rid of filth fast, and that’s exactly what you’re wishing for. The way this quick clean happens, though, is with harsh chemicals that are equally as bad for you, the user, as they are for the environment.
Cleaning your home with techniques that are better for the environment and your own health may be a bit of a learning experience at first, as they won’t be mass produced and sold for a low price. However, eco-friendly ways to clean can be just as easy once you get the hang of it. You’ll find that you won’t need to buy strong chemicals again, and your home will look shiny and new in no time.
Lemon Window Cleaner
Everyone’s got their usual window-cleaning product they keep under the kitchen sink, but it may be time to stop paying for your favorite brand. You already have window-cleaning products in the house. Save some money and use up those lemons in your fridge instead. If you combine 2 tablespoons of lemon juice with 1 quart of water in a spray bottle, you’ll make a window cleaner that rivals the leading brands.
White Vinegar Bathroom Solution
When you’re cleaning your bathroom, do you have to make sure to open a window and get some ventilation in order to keep from burning your lungs with the aroma of your cleaning liquids? Skip your remaining products on your next big clean and use white vinegar instead.
You’ll still want to open a window just because of the potent smell, but vinegar will polish those bathroom surfaces and let you wipe away grim with ease if you allow it time to soak. You probably already have a container sitting in the back of your pantry, so try it out!
Baking Soda Toilet Bowl Cleaner
It’s easy to think that if you wash away chemicals after you clean, you aren’t hurting the environment, but that’s actually not true. Every chemical you replace with a greener option helps reduce your carbon footprint, and there’s a great way to do this with your typical toilet bowl cleaner as well.
Baking soda is a great option to switch out your chlorine-based toilet cleaner with. The thing that makes chlorine so bad to use is that it’s a highly caustic solution, meaning it has an extremely high level of acidity that can erode living tissue, whether it’s human or animal. To prevent this liquid from being released into the environment, clean your toilet bowl with baking soda. It’ll eat away at any mold and leave your toilet sparkling.
Unclog Your Drain With Vinegar and Baking Soda
In the kitchen or the bathroom, drains will clog with almost anything that goes down them, even if you do your best to put old food in the trash can and remove hair from the shower floor. Highly toxic drain cleaners exist to make you feel secure that your drain won’t clog again for a long time, but once released into the environment, these liquids can do damage because of what they’re made of.
The next time you find water pooling around your ankles while you shower, make a quick solution and get instant results. Baking soda and vinegar together, once they sit for a few minutes, can eat away at anything that’s clogging your drain, and they won’t hurt anything once they’re flushed down the pipes.
Freshen Your Bath Mat With Cornstarch
Sometimes you can wash your bath mat over and over again and still smell a mildew scent that seems impossible to remove. Before you throw it in the washer again, sprinkle a cup of cornstarch over it and let it sit for a half hour. The cornstarch will break down any scent-producing dirt and make it easier to clean. Your bathroom will be smelling fresh in no time!
Once you start reading the names of all the chemicals on the back of your cleaning supplies, you might feel the need to go green with what you buy. You likely already have what you need in your kitchen, so all you have to do is learn how to clean while keeping the environment in mind. You’ll quickly see all the benefits your green cleaning supplies will bring, and the money they’ll help stack up in your bank account.
