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This article was originally seen in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Green Living Magazine. View the original article (pdf).
Vinegar and water does nearly as good a job cleaning windows as any ammonia-spiked spray, and borax and baking soda are your allies in the fight to keep your kitchen and bathroom spick and span. But some cleaning projects -- getting that tile grout in the shower white again, removing oven-baked grease or getting out laundry stains -- have even people with the best of intentions resorting to polluting chemicals.
So we tried out a handful of products to find out what could replace the most toxic offenders in your cleaning arsenal. We focused on two companies Method, a San Francisco outfit that wants to make green cleaning products mainstream, and Nature Clean, a Toronto-based, family-owned company that’s been making environmentally friendly products for decades -- and put their products to the test in a Canadian home populated by a two-year-old, a dust-sensitive dad and a pregnant magazine writer.
Dusting cloths and floor polishes
Method’s slickly designed Omop is the hipster’s answer to housewife-pitched products like the Swiffer --you can imagine some guy in Prada pulling this out from his closet. The mop comes with disposable but compostable dusting pads that lick up dust bunnies, as well as a washable pad that can be used wet or dry. The kit comes with a bottle of toxin-free floor polish that Method suggests pairing with the wet mop. The hardwood never looked so good.
Oven cleaner
Sure, you can use baking soda and a scouring pad to tackle baked-on grime, but conventional ammonia and-lye oven cleaners save a lot of elbow grease, right? Problem is, they also give off toxic fumes and can burn your eyes and skin. Nature Clean offers a barbecue and oven cleaner that’s toxic-fume-free, hypoallergenic and biodegradable (its ingredients include corn and palm-kernel oil, as well as a substance derived from citrus rind). Spray it on, let sit 30 minutes and wipe away. It really works! (Though its strong perfume may encourage the scent-sensitive to prefer bicep-building baking soda.)
Tile cleaner
For regular tile cleaning, Method’s tub + tile soap scum + stain remover cleans well and has a pleasantly mild, eucalyptus-mint smell. However, for the toughest of shower grime, you might want to whip out your Nature Clean oven cleaner. When paired with a scouring pad, we found it to be the best at getting the shower to look like new again.
Stain remover
Some conventional stain-removal products contain neurotoxins like benzene and xylene as well as formaldehyde. Nature Clean’s Laundry Stain Remover is derived from a mixture of plant sources such as corn and castor oil and is non-toxic. It works well enough: a toddler’s jacket came out of the wash looking great. But when it came to the daycare T-shirt, laden with dirt, food and washable paint, it still looked a bit like an art project even after cleaning.
Dishwasher rinse
That electric-blue liquid sure does a good job of keeping the dishes looking sparkly, but it can also send chlorine fumes into your air and phosphates down the drain. Nature Clean offers a biodegradable alternative called All Natural Rinse Agent that, load after load, kept both the cutlery and the glassware glinting.
Try your own green clean off
There are a number of household ecocleaning brands on the market. Experiment and see what works best for you.
Sarah Elton is a Toronto based writer.
Green Living Network
