Commercial carpet cleaners and stain remover may work great, but they are packed full of nasty chemicals. … More
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Summary: Watch as a pair of conservation experts discusses the topic of "green" cleaning in this free online video about environmentalism.
Nili Nathan, host of "Great Healing Getaways", is the creator of a television series and Web site on holistic health, where she researches, writes, and reports. She is a life-long...read more
"Hi, Nili Nathan with a word or two on cleaning green. I want to tell you, avoid these products that have chemicals in it. A very dangerous one is chlorine. You want to read the labels and make sure your products are chlorine free. Chlorine has a byproduct called dioxin which is a known carcinogen so this is a call to action folks. Let's just rid the planet once and for all of all these dangerous household cleaners, including your paper goods. I want you to check your coffee filters. Make sure you buy brown ones with no chlorine and your paper goods as well. Oh my, styrofoam, this will be on the planet forever. When you go to take out, bring your own containers, you know you're going to take it out so bring your own containers. This way we don't have to keep producing these styrofoam containers that are not biodegradable. Another thing you can do is pick some natural cleaners. Let me give you a few ideas here. Liquid castile soap is wonderful. You can use this to clean many things. Baking soda, this is a good scrub for your kitchen sinks and your tiles in the bathroom. Vinegar, this has been used for decades as a natural cleaner. Now when it dries, the odor goes away so you don't have to worry about that. And when you're picking your laundry detergent, make sure you are a label detective, oh, this is great, they recycle the container, it's got that little recycle squiggly, that's great, it's a hundred percent biodegradable. I love this stuff, plant based, great, it's got lavender oil, the essential oil. This is good for our bodies, good for the environment. Let me show you how easy it is to make a natural household cleaner which is eco friendly, it's good for the environment and it's good for our body and our health, it's so simple to make. The first choice you can use is just plain old vinegar. Use one part vinegar to one part water, put it in a spray bottle and you're good to go. You can use this on almost anything, your tiles, your counter tops, almost anything except your wood and your furniture. Now that's a real simple one using vinegar. You want to get more advanced, what I do is I add to this formula a couple of things. One hundred percent pure essential oil of cinnamon. It has antibacterial property, cleans really well and disinfects and it smells so wonderful. I will put about twenty drops, there we go. And that works really fine if you want to find even more and disinfect against germs, I recommend tea tree oil. Tea tree oil is excellent against a lot of bacteria and germs so you can go ahead and add anywhere from ten to twenty drops of tea tree oil in there. And there you have it. Now be sure that you label this with a marker so you know exactly what you put in here. We'll just label it just like that, cinnamon, and there you have it. Hey, did you know that lemon oil can remove stains from your carpet and it's also a great oil to clean hardwood floors? What I do is I put some water in a bottle and about twenty drops of one hundred percent pure lemon oil, shake it up, spray it on my floors or on a carpet stain and it works amazing and it smells so good. As an option, you can add a little vinegar in there too and that's how you can make a really easy, eco friendly carpet and floor cleaner. Instead of using those fabric softeners and fresheners that have artificial perfumes and dyes, I recommend a natural formula of lavender flowers. This is wonderful, you're going to love it. Just get some dry lavender flowers, put it in a muslin bag just like I'm doing, that's about all you need, tie it tight and then what you want to do is throw this in the dryer with your clothing and that's going to smell delicious and wonderful and it's good for your skin. It's good for people who have skin sensitivity and allergies. You won't have any of those problems when you use natural eco friendly herbs an flowers."
eHow Article: "Green" Cleaning