Spring has well and truly sprung and spring cleaning your home has probably entered your mind. Before we spring clean our homes we should spring clean our cleaning products.
Unless you are truly an organised wonder, you probably have a bunch of old cleaning products sitting in the cupboard under the kitchen sink or in the laundry cupboard. Half used long forgotten products, products with toxic and harmful ingredients, products that you bought and can’t remember why? If this sounds like you then you might need our cleaning product spring cleaning guide.
The first step in our cleaning product spring cleaning process is to gather up all of the products and then decide if they stay or go. So instead of asking if it ‘sparks joy’ Marie Kondo style, ask yourself the following questions about your cleaning product.
Products like bleach (sodium hypochlorite), ammonia, and drain cleaner (also known as caustic soda or sodium hydroxide) are often irritating to users and can even cause burns to skin. It is really safer to not keep these products around (especially if you have young children) as there are safer alternatives for most cleaning jobs.
Ingredients like phosphate and nitrate are harmful to our environment and can contribute to the eutrophication of our waterways (see ingredients) so it is best to move products containing these ingredients to the discard pile. Phosphates and nitrates are commonly found in laundry detergents and dishwasher detergents so check these products first.
The use of fillers is common in laundry powders and they are often salts that add bulk to the powder without any real performance benefit. They can also result in high sodium levels in your waste water which is not good if you want to reuse your grey water. Other ingredients such as zeolites are also found as phosphate replacements in some laundry powders. Zeolites are insoluble and can cause build-up in your washing machine and even on your clothes.
Sometimes we buy a new product and it just doesn’t clean well, so it just sits in the cupboard until we finally throw it out. Life is too short to bother with cleaning products that don’t actually clean, not when you can easily get eco-friendly products that actually work. So if you have any of these not-so-great products sitting around add them to the ‘to go’ pile.
The next step is to discard your unwanted products. We recommend contacting your local council to find out the best options for disposal for where you live. Most councils have locations or days when you can take your unwanted household chemicals and drop them off so that they can be safely disposed of without harming the environment.
Put those environmentally friendly cleaning products back into your cupboard and start planning the tasks on your spring cleaning list. If you don’t have anything left to put back in your cupboard take a look at Tri Natue’s range of high-performance, eco-friendly cleaning products that will actually work without harming ourselves or the environment.
