How To Green Clean Your Home

Are you ready for this? The air in your home could very well be up to three times more polluted than the air outside of your home! Yuckeeee! Poor indoor air quality can lead to some pretty nasty side effects in your health, such as asthma, headaches, dizziness, even difficulty concentrating. What also may surprise you is that one of the main contributors to indoor air pollution is all of the products that you use to clean and scent your home. Those chemicals may shine the surface and scent the air, but what they do to your body and the environment is pretty scary! The answer? CLEAN GREEN!

When you clean your home with safe and natural products, it is better for your health and better for the environment as well. The more chemicals we can keep out of the air and water, the better! So, walk on by the cleaning product aisle. You can make safe cleaners out of stuff you may very well have in your home already, and save tons of money doing it.

A few simple ingredients is everything you need to clean your entire home:

Lemon Juice — An awesome de-greaser.
White Vinegar — Dissolves hard water and cleans glass and mirrors like a charm.
Baking Soda — Use this instead of harsh scouring powder that can hurt your lungs.
Essential Oils — These are all-natural and can scent up your entire home. If you want more information on essential oils, check out this site!
Castile Soap — This liquid soap is completely mild, safe, and biodegradable. You can even use this as a laundry detergent and a shampoo and body wash as well!

Here are some handy recipes for some safe cleaners you can use in your home:

All-Purpose Cleaner — Fill up a spray bottle with water, but leave a little room at the top. Add a squirt of castile soap and then scent it with essential oils.
Anti-Bacterial Cleaner — Same recipe for the all-purpose cleaner, except use Tea Tree oil for the essential oil. Tea Tree oil is a natural anti-microbial.
Furniture Polish — Two parts lemon juice and one part light olive oil. Add a drop of castile soap, shake it up, spray it on your furniture, and buff it until it shines.

For even more in-depth information, click here to check out one of Hannah's previous printed articles about Green Cleaning in Home Life Magazine.