Homemade Cleaning Products

Why Switch from "Traditional" Cleaning Supplies?

First, I would like to note that I put the word "traditional" in quotations because they've only been considered traditional for a couple of generations.  In fact, my mother, who is only in her fifties, remembers cleaning the first apartment that she moved into when she was 18, in the late 1970's, with baking soda and vinegar.  So, there's really nothing traditional about these chemical cleaning products.  They are new products that have become embedded in our culture only recently as a result of the very ambitious and convincing marketing industry.


Although, I grew up in the eighties and nineties, one of the first cohorts to be raised in an age of advertisements bombarding everyone all day long, I have always intuitively felt that all of these chemicals we use to clean our homes might be harmful to us.  I don't know if it's the synthetic smell or the overly-happy (almost zombie-ish) women in the commercials, but I've just always had a bad feeling about them. 

Then, as a young adult, I started studying about environmental problems and informed myself about how these chemicals negatively interact with our bodies and with the environment, not to mention how the production of the chemicals, their packaging (plastic bottles), and the transportation of these products are all quite harmful to the environment (and, thus, us).  Only a handful of these products have been tested for their long-term toxicity to humans and a link has been found between the repeated use of bleach and cancer.  Even in light of all of these negative effects, it took me a couple of years before I really realized that it's not a law of nature that I had to continue using all of these commercial cleaning products.  So, I decided to look into how I could live a more chemical-free lifestyle.  My first living experiment along these lines was last year when I decided to try making my own household cleaning supplies.

I found tons of blogs and articles online describing how to do it and giving recipes for the cleaning products.  Luckily, you only need 4 ingredients, if you want to cover all of your basic cleaning needs: borax, baking soda, white vinegar and lemons.  (Also, you can add essential oils, if you want a nicer smell, but I quite like the fresh lemon smell.)  Below are the recipes that I've found to produce the most effective, simplest cleaning agents.

Recipes

Kitchen and Bathroom Spray:  In a spray bottle, mix 1 cup of white vinegar, 1 cup of water.  The vinegar dissolves dirt, soap scum and hard water stains and it is also a natural deoderizer (and it does not smell when it dries!). 
or
2 liters of water
1/4 cup of baking soda
1/2 cup of vinegar

Floors:
1/2 cup of vinegar
1 gallon of warm water (works great! again, the vinegar doesn't smell at all when it dries, I promise!)



Toilet bowls:
Pour 1/4 cup of baking soda and drizzle with vinegar.
Let it sit for a half hour.  Scrub and flush.  Add borax for stains.


These are just the few that I have tried.  But there are recipes for non-toxic, homemade cleaning products for everything from window cleaning fluid to disinfectants.  I encourage anyone who is even mildly interested to take a little time and try out this "living experiment" ;)

Here are some nice links that have more recipes and more info:

Ecocycle, Organized Home, Earth Easy

Happy cleaning!