Simple Cleaning Solutions for a Cleaner Home and Environment

One responsibility of a homeowner is to make sure that your home is clean and safe for your family. This requires cleaning it on a regular basis. However, while certain cleaning products may do a decent job cleaning your home, they may not be safe for the environment.

It’s important to be conscious about how the products we use in our home contribute to problems like pollution, the destruction of natural ecosystems, and global warming. With that in mind, below are some simple solutions for making a cleaner home and environment.

Use Lemon Juice and Baking Soda as a Cleaner

The dish cleaners and other cleaning solutions you buy in bottles in the store can also be quite harmful to the environment. Thankfully, there are more eco-friendly choices for degreasing your dishes and cleaning other parts of your home. Lemon juice and baking soda are excellent alternatives. Just add a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice, one teaspoon of baking soda, and one-half teaspoon of regular soap to two cups of water to create an environmentally friendly and completely natural cleaning solution.

Use White Vinegar as a Cleaner

White vinegar is another excellent choice to use in your cleaning solutions. Like lemon juice, it is acidic and naturally cuts grease. It also has the ability to remove mildew, and it will freshen whatever you clean it with. It’s a good choice for removing stains and can be used to clean walls, floors, bathrooms, kitchens, and more.

Swap Out Paper Towels for Dishcloths

Something else that is completely wasteful is the number of paper towels most households go through for cleaning. The amount of trees used by this industry to make the paper towels is substantial and certainly contributes to the clearing of forests.

Instead, you can choose a more reusable and environmentally friendly choice like a Swedish dishcloth. A single cloth can replace up to as many as 15 rolls of paper towel. Reusable options like these reduce waste and require fewer resources for manufacturing. While they may be slightly more expensive than paper towels upfront, the benefits are worth it.

Switch to Biodegradable Garbage Bags

Most garbage bags are not environmentally friendly. They are made from certain kinds of plastics that create pollution to manufacture. Even worse, they don’t actually break down when dumped into a landfill. 

However, not all trash bags are made of those harmful plastics. Instead, you can find biodegradable alternatives for collecting and disposing of your trash. Look for bags that are marked as completely compostable.

Cleaning your home is part of your responsibility as a homeowner. However, you should be careful about what you use to clean your home. You may be unaware that certain cleaners, solutions, and more are actually harmful to the environment. Instead, choose eco-friendly alternatives like those listed above. Doing so will set a good example for your family to emulate going forward.

By Anita Ginsberg

Anita is a freelance writer from Denver, CO. She studied at Colorado State University and now writes articles about health, business, family, and finance. A mother of two, she enjoys traveling with her family whenever she isn’t writing. You can follow her on Twitter @anitaginsburg.