There are many alternatives to simply buying chemical cleaning products to clean our homes, and most of them are entirely natural and can even be found in the average store cupboard. Chemical cleaning agents can ironically be more harmful to your health than a dirty home, as many of them contain carcinogens, endocrine disruptors and neurotoxins. While these can be just as harmful to adults, our children are most at risk since they are constantly touching surfaces and putting objects into their mouths.
So, let’s look at some far less harmful cleaning solutions and their essential ingredients:
Baking Soda
This is the perfect scouring agent to use in your home and is also a great deodorizer.
Coarse Salt
This is another scouring agent that can be out to good use in your home; not only is it cheap but it’s completely safe and natural. Rather surprisingly, salt also makes an effective softener.
Distilled White Vinegar
Vinegar has bacteria fighting qualities and is much safer to use than a product like bleach. White vinegar also works well on grease stains and soap residue.
Castile Soap
This soap which can easily be found in stores across the country, is incredibly gentle on the skin but exceptionally tough on dirt, grease and grime.
Bar Soap
When making your own laundry detergent from natural ingredients, bar soap will often be one of them, and is grated into the recipe. If using the bar of soap whole, it can be used to effectively pre-treat stains.
Washing Soda
With it’s remarkable ability to cut through grease, and deodorize and disinfect surfaces or fabrics, washing soda is often found in homemade cleaning recipes.
Citric Acid
When washing dishes, or glass items, citric acid makes the prefect solution to stopping water spots, cloudiness or streaking. It can also be safely (and cheaply) used for getting rid of wine stains and cleaning stainless steel.
Olive Oil
If you’re making a wood cleaner from scratch, then you’ll probably want to have olive oil be part of the recipe, as not only does it clean dirt from wood, but it conditions it at the same time.
Essential Oils
It’s perhaps little known that essential oils possess strong antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral qualities, and while they may be added to some cleaning products to make them smell nice, they work very effectively in conjunction with other natural cleaning ingredients to remove dirt and germs.
Now you can see just how easy it is to clean your home without the need for harsh, environmentally damaging chemical cleaning products, and worrying about the health of any little ones in your home, can become a distant memory.