You don’t even need to be that concerned about the future of the planet (though why on earth wouldn’t you be?) either.  Much that is ‘green’ is also frugal and healthy.  Avoiding exposure to harmful chemicals is just as important for you, your kids and pets, as it is for the micro-organisms residing in our water-ways.

Personally I don’t really think it matters what your motivations are, so long as you do something to rely less heavily on bleaches and harmful disinfectants that do nobody any good at all.  Yes your toilet bowl might shine so bright you feel satisfied you are doing your job of keeping house and home spic and span.  But at what cost?

Re-evaluating your routines, and changing just one thing a month, to something a little more environmentally friendly will do you the world of good, as the one responsible for keeping the home clean too.  You don’t really want to be breathing in all those toxic fumes do you?

By looking for traditional ways to tackle the chores you can avoid both dangerous products, and also expensive ones too.  There are so many cheap cleaning options; from baking soda to scrub the bath tub, to white vinegar to disinfect your counter tops.  You don’t have to pay much for the greenest cleaners, and you don’t have to have a closet full of bottles you would rather your children didn’t get hold of.

And don’t think your new flower scented, organic product with its pretty green bottle is necessarily the best option either.  Think more basic than that.  You need to aim for:

• Non toxic cleaners
• No chlorine bleach
• Concentrated cleaners
• Recyclable packaging
• Readily bio-degradable ingredients
• Safe to use – and that means often choosing items designed to be used in the work-place, since they must pass far more stringent health and safety requirements as far as user exposure is concerned

More basic things to consider are:

• Using less water to rinse those products away
• Avoiding irritants (even natural ones) such as citrus oils
• What cloths / sponges etc are you using – can they be recycled or re-used?
• How sterile does your home really need to be?  There is far too much emphasis on doing away with every bacteria or germ in the home.  In some cases this is a must, but most of us live far more healthy allergy free lives if we come into some contact with these naturally occurring organisms.

Enjoy your clean home but not to the expense of your health (or indeed the planets), and make at least one change today towards more Environmentally aware green cleaning.

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Whilst some people are more than happy with a splash of vinegar or some baking soda to clean the bathroom you may find such homemade remedies simply don’t fit into your hectic schedule or your normal cleaning routine.  Try them, you might well be surprised.  And, even if you don’t use these ultimate green cleaners for all your household chores, if they save you from the evils of bleach or chlorine based products only for one task they will help.

Trying new ways to do our ordinary housework is best done in stages.  If you try to re-work your entire cleaning regime you are far more likely to fail, become discouraged and ultimately return to your old ways.  Far better to change one thing.  Find a green cleaner you are happy to use and then tackle the next chore or type of product you use.

Being more environmentally friendly has to be a gradual process for most of us bought up using and abusing the earth’s resources.  We may know we should re-vamp our whole lifestyles but frankly that just isn’t likely to happen for more than a tiny minority of die hard eco warriors.  Rather than be deterred by your inability to alter everything, do one thing, and do it well, be happy with your choices, enjoy the satisfaction of knowing you are ever so slightly more green than you used to be, and you will be encouraged by that one small success to change other aspects of your household chores, or indeed your life too.

Baby steps are what we should be thinking about, because even if you can afford to use organic, natural everything unless you use those products wisely and really think about their impact on the planet, through using resources, transportation and water etc you may as well just use a little less but continue with your old traditional products.

Green cleaning products have to suit you and your routine.  So when thinking about making the change pick one product and do something about the nasty polluting or dangerous version in your closet.  When you have found a great green alternative that keeps you happy in your routine and is Eco enough for you move on to the next.

Most of us simply cannot be perfect, and frankly even if we were you just know some new scare or new story will make us realise that perfection was far from true.  So stop sweating about everything and just do something, anything to make your cleaning just a little bit more Eco Friendly today.

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Thankfully Commercial Green Cleaning is growing.  As businesses feel pressure to literally clean up their act, they are starting to employ more environmentally friendly contractors too.  This is great news for the planet and probably even better news for those that work in the cleaning industry too.

A few of the key things I at least feel more commercial cleaners should be thinking about are as follows:

• Focusing on safe cleaning products.  Due to the rules and regulations regarding health and safety at work, this tends to occur not so much out of choice, but simply due to necessity.  But still keeping those cleaning products non-toxic and safe to use is crucial for those people that actually carry out the work of keeping our work-places clean.
• Water usage.  Water is the key component for so much of our cleaning techniques, but since it is safe it is often neglected when thinking about the environmental impact of our activities.  Simple things like using less water with a flat-head mop and not rinsing in a huge bucket of water, can really help when you consider just how much floor mopping gets carried out in the average office block.
• Ditching paper towels.  As we have already seen microfiber cloths can be used and used again and most importantly need very little detergent to do a sterling job.  If commercial cleaning companies switch from chlorine contaminated paper towels to re-usable microfiber cloths they could have a huge impact on deforestation and save themselves money on wasted detergents.

Due to commercial businesses focus on profit some of the things we need to do to make our home cleaning more Eco friendly automatically get done.  Buying concentrated cleaners for example is a no-brainer within the cleaning industry but something more home-owners would do well to copy.

If you are trying to make your home more Eco friendly you should be trying to do the same at work.  Voicing our concerns in the workplace and requesting more environmentally responsible practices including the use of green cleaning contractors is crucial for promoting widespread change.

Commercial Green Cleaning is perhaps even more important for the planet than Green Cleaning at home.  But, still you want a healthier environment inside your house too.  Somewhere safe and free from toxins so do be sure to make the switch so we all end up with more Eco Friendly Homes too.

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1. Eco Cleaning Gadgets

But, though we may sound ‘holier than thou’ at times, expressing a desire for everyone to think more about making their Cleaning Eco Friendly, we can assure you we are not.  Our home is an average one, where sometimes the thought of elbow grease is enough to put you off doing the chores entirely.

There are time savers and more importantly effort savers that can really help on the greener cleaning front though.  So, we shall interrupt our usual programing to bring you the best Eco Cleaning Gadget Reviews we can lay our pretty little hands on.

First up will be the Bissell 1400-7 Little Green Cleaning Machine. Yes, we know it uses electricity and it is made up of plastics and resins.  But, delve a little deeper and there is an awful lot to keep even the greenest greenie happy.  Post consumer recycled materials, biodegradable carpet cleaning solution, Styrofoam free recycled packaging.  And that is just the machine.  Add to that the fact it is also helping our carpets and upholstery remain in tip top, stain free condition for longer.  This means a clever green gadget could mean a longer time between new purchases which is of course one of the most environmentally friendly things you can do.

So, hang fire for the Eco Cleaning Gadgets Series…

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1. Green Cleaning Gadgets – Vapamore MR-100 Dry Steam Vapor Cleaner Review
2. Green Cleaning Gadgets – Evriholder Slipper Genie Microfiber Cleaning Slippers
3. Make Cleaning Eco Friendly – The Dark Green Approach
4. Green Cleaning Products
5. Commercial Green Cleaning

The first step to greener cleaning is of course to stop using harmful chemical cleaners.  That means getting rid of anything toxic, dangerous, non-biodegradable and indeed harmful in any way.  But, one persons idea of safe, toxic or dangerous might be something quite different to another’s.  While getting everyone to use less dangerous, less toxic and more safe cleaning products helps the environment, it does not remove the effects we are having on the planet altogether.  Some improvement is always better than none, so getting everyone to become a little bit greener does improve things for us all.

The Dark Green Approach to Eco Friendly Cleaning

But, for many this simply isn’t good enough.  For them, removing every artificial chemical that is harmful is key.  But to achieve this goal of perfectly Green Cleaning is far harder to accomplish.  The thing is where do you stop.  You may have found the most environmentally friendly cleaning range on the high street, but can you afford it and do you agree with the packaging, the labor used to produce it, the distance it was transported after manufacture?  The list of questions to ask yourself if you are really trying to be a Dark Green Greenie are simply endless.  And, worse still, not all the answers are that forthcoming.  That is why I believe the really environmentally conscious homeowner will be looking to change their cleaning habits in a far more radical way.

Purely swapping to a different brand is not the end of the issue.  To make cleaning dark green involves some of the following ideas:

• Consolidating cleaning products
• Homemade remedies
• Dual purpose items such as cleaning with vinegar, scouring with salt and baking soda
• Buying concentrated formulas
• Using less water
• Using nothing but water and microfiber cloths
• Short cool cycles for the laundry
• Laundry balls
• All natural cleaners such as soap nuts
• Avoiding anything derived from the petrochemical industry
• Avoiding all plastics and packaging that cannot be readily recycled
• Choosing only 100% biodegradable cleaning products
• Trying to buy locally produced products
• Relying on more elbow grease than miracle cleaner

In short being really Eco Friendly about your cleaning takes guts and determination!

The dark green approach to Eco Friendly Cleaning does not stop here, but you can see it is a much more serious business.  In truth it just is not practical to expect us all to be creating homemade soaps or hand-washing diapers.  But simply considering the things on the list can provoke thought and improvement in the way we do deal with the household chores.  Rather than feel we simply can never be green enough it is far better to see the list of truly green cleaning ideas as something we may be able to incorporate at least in part into our day to day work.  An improvement here and there is an improvement for all of us after all!

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1. Make Cleaning Eco Friendly
2. Why Make Cleaning Eco Friendly?
3. Eco Friendly Cleaning with the Goodbye Detergent Original Spaghetti Scrub
4. Eco Green Cleaning Products
5. Why Switch to Eco Cleaning Products?