“Green Cleaning”
by Sarah on April 28th, 2009
April has felt like tornado season as Earth Day, Spring, and nine guests have come and gone through my apartment. Since my apartment is already dirty, that makes it the perfect time to make my Earth Day green change and “green clean” instead of “spring clean”. As I tasked myself to research the best ways that I could green clean, every tip surprisingly made me think, “wow, that is so cheap and doable!” To round out a month of green blogging, I wanted to provide you with my five favorite tips on how you too can green clean.
1. Clean your entire home with only six basic ingredients
Almost every website I visited used the following ingredients to clean everything from toilets to carpets to ovens:
• distilled vinegar
• baking soda or borax
• castile or eco-friendly soap
• oxygen bleach powder or hydrogen peroxide
• water
• antiseptic essential oils, such as cinnamon, clove, lavender, and lemon
Thedailygreen.com, whose mission is to show how going green is relevant to everyone, can give you the ingredient combination for your cleaning needs. My favorite combination chases ½ cup of baking soda down a drain with ½ cup of vinegar, covers tightly, and then flushes one gallon of boiling water down the drain to unclog a post-guest drain. And it costs approximately the same as any traditional cleaning product.
Best of all, according to Seventh Generation, if every U.S. household used a homemade green cleaner instead of one 32-oz. bottle of petroleum-based all purpose cleaners, we would use 6800 fewer barrels of oil . I’d say that is one small step for vinegar and one large step for “household kind.”
2. Recycle your paper and old clothes into cleaning devices
Why not look to that hoard of newspapers and clothes you don’t wear anymore to help mop up the grime? Cotton t-shirts are easy to rip into the perfect size reusable cleaning rag. Additionally, most researchers agree that the large pile of newspapers amassing in the corner is ideal for cleaning windows and glass objects before being recycled.
3. Recycle unwanted electronics – they contain precious metals
As I mentioned in my previous post on mobile phones, in a 1.2 billion global mobile phone market, 60% of all purchases replace existing cell phones – while only 1% of them are recycled.
A cell phone contains 14% copper by weight and also contains gold, silver, and about one cent’s worth of platinum. I would not throw away a bracelet if it contained those elements, so why discard a drawer full of mobile phones?
E-cycle these items, just don’t dispose of them!
4. Plant one houseplant per 100 square feet of living area
The EPA estimates that indoor air is 2 to 10 times more polluted than outdoor air due to the synthetic materials in much of our household appliances, accessories, and cleaning products. A NASA study of 15 common houseplants found that they could help remove toxins from the air. Although the EPA did not find any evidence that houseplants could remove significant quantities of indoor pollutants, outside of allergies, what is the harm in trying? Plants that might remove home toxins are spider plants, gerbera daisies, chrysanthemums, peace lilies and bamboo.
And let’s face it: green just looks good in a home!
5. Fresh air and weatherproofing is an energy saving combination
According to The Global Warming Survival Handbook, the average US home creates twice the CO2 of a car in one year. That is 22,000 lbs. Taking advantage of warm weather to increase my household’s energy efficiency could also decrease my energy bill by 20-30%. And it all starts with spring cleaning!
Weather proofing windows with “low-e” coasting, blocks heat and UV rays and can lower energy consumption by 20-30%. Additionally, the natural light that longer days provide, enable me to finally change traditional light bulbs to fluorescent ones, reducing lighting energy consumption by 80%.
Wow! My Earth Day resolution poses a lot to tackle! But as a Chinese proverb states “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” It’s time to start walking!
Tags: community development, energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, green banking, ShoreBank, spring cleaning, triple bottom line
Vinegar has so many uses. That’s why I always have this at home.