12 Easy Peasy Ways to Green Clean | Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

Since I worked out that we "needed" - or at least were buying - 75 separate products to keep the house running, I've been on a mission to cut down and clean greener.

We were buying a lot of green products but too many of them were single use

Where we weren't buying green it was because - as an anxious mum - I had completely swallowed the need for, what now seem like, industrial strength anti-bacterial cleaners.

But with the help of some of my favourite blogging friends I am cutting more and more products off my "essentials" list and replacing them with home made and green objects.

From this experience, my 12 top easy-peasy ways to greener cleaning are:

Stock up on baking soda (bicarb)
Stock up on vinegar
Stock up on hydrogen peroxide
Make your own cleaners
Make use of essential oils
Use what you've already got
Use microfibre cloths
Use products that let you use less
Use multi-purpose products
Stop confusing artificial smells with cleanliness
Cut down on energy use
Re-use waste products

Stock up on baking soda

Is there anything that baking soda can't do? It can clean ovens, hobs, microwaves and washing machines, unblock sinks and remove stains and smells from carpets, furniture and mattresses. (Plus it's also completely brilliant for fun science experiments!)

If you haven't got a big box in stock, get one.

Stock up on vinegar

A Typical English Home got the scale off her
taps with vinegar.

Second only to baking soda in the green cleaning stakes, plain old distilled white vinegar can be used to clean all sorts of things from showers, loos, floors, irons, dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves, fridges. It has anti-bacterial properties, cuts through grease and grime and is particularly brilliant at attacking lime scale.

Sweet Parrish Place and This Girl's Life have all sorts of advice on how best to use it and A Typical English Home great tips on how to use it to cut through really caked on limescale on your taps and your dishwasher.

And if you're not so keen on the smell check out this recipe for Citrus Infused Vinegar from Ang Says.

Stock up on hydrogen peroxide

Next in the list of top natural cleaners is hydrogen peroxide. It's brilliant for whitening your wash and removing blood and protein based stains from clothes, carpets and soft furnishings.

It can even - as Summers Acres will vouch for - be used to whiten your teeth!

Make your own products

Re-use your old bottles fo your own
products and decorate with your own labels
like A Little Bit of Quiet

Once stocked up with baking soda, vinegar and hydrogen peroxide you can easily start making your own products.

Little Mom on the Prairie has a really simple recipe for a shower and bath cleaner using vinegar and dish washing liquid. And A Little Bit of Quiet shows how you can use vinegar in different ways to make a general cleaner, a special stainless steel cleaner and a cleaner for disinfecting the fridge.

De Jong Dream House has a simple stain remover recipe using just dish washing liquid and hydrogen peroxide. And Real Life Notes shows how you can make your own wipes using olive oil and castille soap.

If you're ready to be a bit more adventurous and want to make your own laundry detergent check out this excellent series from Mish Mash Mama in which she evaluates a whole range of ingredients and recipes both for their effectiveness and greenness.

Make use of essential oils

The Pin Junkie cleaned tarnished pots
with old tomato ketchup!

Essential oils will make your home made products smell wonderful but also have cleaning powers themselves. Mish Mash Mama has recipes for bathroom and kitchen counter sprays made with essential oils and Weekly Essential shows you how to add different essential oils to products for different purposes.

Use what you've already got

If you've got a specific cleaning problem you're trying to fix, with a little bit of research - aka checking Pinterest - you'll almost certainly be able to find a solution using products you already have.

The Pin Junkie found this amazing, no effort solution for cleaning tarnished copper pots - the tarnish reduces effectiveness - with, you'll never believe it, old ketchup!

Use microfibre cloths

As Eyes on the Source shows, microfibre cloths can be used for everything from cleaning windows, washing up, cleaning the floors, dusting, polishing and drying dishes to soaking up spills.

Using them will allow you to cut out all that wasteful kitchen roll that takes up so much storage space.

And with a bit of ingenuity, you can, like De Jong Dream House, make microfibre cloths just as accessible as kitchen roll and disposable cloths.

Use products that let you use less

Before I really focused on how much of everything we were using, I couldn't believe how often we seemed to be replacing expensive cleaning products.

But Michelle Muckala shows that you only need to use a tiny amount of some of the best green products that you can buy so they will last a lot longer than apparently cheaper and less planet friendly products.

And in case you're not convinced that green products can really cut through serious grime check out Happy Healthy and Domestic's post and pictures that show how she used green products to clean through layers of filth when they moved into a new rented property.

Use multi-purpose products

I confess that in the past I have been a real sucker for lots of different products that supposedly did very different things, particularly those incredibly expensive ones that come recommended by cooker, dishwasher, washing machine etc manufacturers.

If you make your own you will only need to slightly tweak products to have real multi-purpose solutions and if you hunt around you can also find great multi-purpose products from Shaklee,Ecover, Method and Ecos.

Michella Muckala, for example, has found one product that she can use to clean the oven and the shower!

Stop confusing artificial smells with cleanliness

Eyes on the Source has a a really great post highlighting how we have become programmed to associate cleanliness with overpowering and usually artificial smells. We need to get the artificial fragrances out of our houses to rediscover what naturally clean really smells like.

However, if you are cleaning with vinegar for example, it does have quite a strong smell that you can compensate for by, Summers Acres shows, commercial air freshener plug ins with natural essential oils added rather than expensive, chemical based refills.

Cut down on energy use

The kitchen can cost you an absolute fortune in energy bills if you're not careful but there are loads of easy ways you can cut your usage and your bills. To get started, check out this list of 70 household energy saving tips.

Re-use waste products

To cut even more products off your household shopping list you can make your own simple household products from waste.

Domesblissity has loads of brilliant lists of ideas for re-using waste. A Little Bit of Quiet has made really pretty bottles for her home made cleaning products by re-using empty bottles and decorating them with cute labels. And Little Mom on the Prairie has some really nifty ideas for fastening packets so you don't have to buy bag ties and clips.

I hope you found these easy tips helpful - I would love to hear your suggestions, and if you've got great green cleaning posts do link them up below.