Natural Cleaning and My Favourite Products

First off, let me just state that cleaning is not my favourite thing to do. I enjoy having a clean and organized house, but I don’t really enjoy the work that it takes to get there.

Ok, now moving on. Next to the food that we eat, our environment impacts our health the most. What we put on our bodies and clean our houses with will either help your body, or cause a host of other problems. There are over 60,000 chemicals that are used in cleaning products and most of them are not tested for safety, efficacy, the effects on the environment, or the effects of accumulation in humans. That’s pretty scary. It’s also scary that when they tested the umbilical cords of babies, they found a number of these dangerous chemicals.

So here’s my solution. You need to know what is in your cleaning products. Don’t search for products that have a green label or say “natural”. That’s called “greenwashing”, which means that the company is trying to look natural to sell more products. You want products that are actually safe. There are is an app called Think Dirty and a website called the EWG that you can use to determine how safe your products are but here are some of my favourite products.

Thieves Cleaner. I cannot say enough about this stuff. I use one bottle of cleaner to clean my entire house. Floors, windows, walls, showers, toilets, literally everything. It is very concentrated so you only need to add one capful to a spray bottle of water. It also smells like cinnamon, clove and lemon.

Attitude Dish Soap. I’ve tried numerous dish soaps and they all make my dishes feel greasy afterwards. This has no dangerous chemicals in it, and gets everything nice and clean.

Thieves Laundry Detergent. I love this stuff. I use this hack to make it last a lot longer. It’s also extremely concentrated so I can get a lot of bang for my buck, this means that I’m not paying for water and it’s better for the environment.

For mopping my floors, I use a Steam Mop. I have very dark floors that show every bit of mud and dirt (if you’re thinking about dark floors, I would advise against it!). I end up mopping my floors once or twice a day so it comes in handy. I uses steam to kill any bacteria on the floors and lift away dirt and grime. Sometimes I put a drop of an essential oil into the water container so that my house smells amazing afterwards.

For more information, I suggest taking a look at this article by the Environmental Workers Group.

Happy Cleaning!