Your home is where you live, and most important of all you want to be breathing clean air. For that reason, using harsh chemicals in your home doesn’t make a lot of sense. You don’t want to breathe them, and you don’t want your kids or pets breathing them either – or accidentally drinking them.
Believe it or not, it is possible to use green cleaning products and still have a clean house. Often, you can make sue of everyday household items that most people have easily to hand, says John Pletz, CEO of ServiceMaster Clean by Pletz, based in Crystal Lake, Illinois.
For example, use a little vinegar on a cleaning cloth to shine your sink and your chrome. Use baking soda and a little moisture to get rid of stains in sinks. However, using a commercial quality toilet bowl cleaner is still best on the home front. A green toilet bowl cleaner can work commercially if you are cleaning your toilet daily. But at home every once in a while you need one that has phosphoric acid, which is mild, or hydrochloric acid – use that as a last resort to remove rust stains.
Green Tips for Home
Here are some other green tips you can easily implement at home:
- If every household in the U.S. replaced 1 roll of 1,000 sheet bathroom tissues with 100% recyclable rolls, we could save 373,000 trees, 1.48 million cubic feet of landfill space and 155 gallons of water.
- Eliminate waste by choosing products that are biodegradable or recyclable.
- Look for reclaimed wood products salvaged from older structures and certified wood harvested from sustainably managed forests.
- If every one of 110 million American households bought replaced a standard light bulb (60 watt) for an energy-efficient one, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. If each household would swap out just one standard bulb for an energy efficient bulb, we would enough electricity to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads. Not only do they save on energy, they last an estimated 5 years.
- Replace exterior electrical landscape lighting with solar lighting.
Trying to be eco-friendly on the home front isn’t all that difficult, but it can impact the way we live - and will affect future generations to come. It’s worth trying to be as environmentally conscious as possible, and what better place to start than at home?
