January 4th - Clean and Green?

With the Christmas decorations down you can really see the dust and dirt :) so today seems like a good day to clean house.

As far as cleaning products go we don't normally pay much attention to ethics in terms of what we purchase and tend to go for the same products that we have used for years that get the job done.  Having read a fair few scary things over the last few weeks about their effect on the environment and on our own health we thought we'd better give it a bit more thought.

Most of the things we use seem to be owned by Proctor & Gamble (Bold, Lenor, Fairy), Unilever (Cif, Domestos) or Reckitt Benckiser (Dettol, Finish, Windolene).  Predictably all of them have dire ECRA ratings with human rights violations, animal testing policies, anti-social practices etc.  Most of them are sprays and so are breathed in when we use them and apparently the effect are more harmful to children than adults as their bodies are smaller - guiltfest!

So we have decided it is time to clean up our cleaning cupboard and switch to products which are kinder to us and the environment and produced by companies that operate more ethically.

Our main worries are:

• Will more natural products work as well?
• Will they be expensive?
• Can we get hold of them easily?

Options seem to be:

• To go completely green and use completely natural cleaning products which are also much cheaper.  These seem to be mainly baking soda, vinegar, lemon juice (there is also something called borax - not quite as kind).  
• Or to find more ethical cleaning products.  

Going completely natural is a step too far for us at the moment and I really can't practically see myself mixing up potions and squeezing lemons every time I clean the loo (!) - it would get done even less than it does now! So we opted to do an online "green" cleaning product order.

We definitely didn't find this easy! In fact it was a minefield: checking out different websites, comparing the prices with our usual brands and looking up ECRA ratings.  It actually felt like learning another language.  So in the end we picked a few brands that rated well:  Ecover, BioD, Ecoleaf, Green People and just looked at their products. Like anything I suppose this will get easier as we get used to it but it was a big time investment in the first place - it took us two hours to do a £30 order.

Prices in comparison to supermarket brands are EXPENSIVE!  It seems that the way you get round this is to order in bulk which makes an order much more reasonable and is greener from the point of view of van delivery. We found that most companies offer free delivery over £50 as well.  Our plan at the moment is to eventually cut prices and packaging by placing a big order three or four times a year.  We only placed a small order this time as we aren't really sure what we were ordered to be honest (how big is a 10 litre bin bag?), whether it's any good what it will smell like especially washing powder etc.  Bulk buying also requires storage - where will we store 50 recycled loo rolls?  We are aiming to clear all the junk out of the garage (long overdue) and use some old shelving that we have.

We opted for www.biggreensmile.com in the end as we liked the website and they give you an expected delivery day - Tuesday.  Sad to say but I'm quite excited :)