June 22, 2020

Guide to Zero Waste Home Cleaning

June 22, 2020/ Kelly Pemberton

Zero waste living is a great step forward in living an environmentally friendly lifestyle. It helps keep trash out of landfills and can even save you money. This guide to zero waste home cleaning will help you live a sustainable and eco-friendly life.

Zero waste home cleaning is an efficient way to keep your home clean and minimize how much trash you produce. Often it is affordable and can even save you more money than traditional cleaning methods.

February 23, 2020

Eco-Friendly Stain Removal Hacks for Tough Stains

February 23, 2020/ Kelly Pemberton

Guest post by Zach Painter

Have you ever been out to eat for an important date, only to spill sauce or your beverage on your shirt or pants? It’s a social blunder that’s hard to recover from, especially if the stain is noticeable. However, what’s even worse is the fact that you have to properly wash the article of clothing to make sure the stain is removed and you can wear it again!

This takes a lot of effort if you really think about it: most people will simply throw the article of clothing into their washing machine, which actually takes a lot of effort, energy, and money over time! The average American household consumes over 13,000 gallons of water a year on washing clothes alone, so you can imagine how that affects your utility bill and the environment.

November 02, 2017

This is How to Maximize Your Cleaning Efforts in an Eco-Friendly Way

November 02, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

Guest post by Clara Beaufort

When you clean your home, you want to feel good about the products you are using and know they are eco-friendly and chemical-free to protect the environment and your family at the same time. You want to create the healthiest environment for everyone, but you may not be sure how to start or which products will deep clean your home. It can be hard to break away from traditional cleaning products, but with a little guidance and knowledge, you’ll be on your way to maximizing your cleaning efforts and making your home the healthiest it can be for your entire family.

May 02, 2017

Eco-friendly cleaning? How to do it without the “greenwashing”

May 02, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

This is the second post in a 3-part series on green cleaning

A quick survey of store shelves these days will tell you that there are more options for purchasing “green” cleaning products than ever before. In North America, Europe, and Australia, the options for buying eco-friendly products reflect regional and class disparities: the coastal areas of the US tend to reflect current trends in eco-conscious lifestyles with greater ubiquity than the southeastern belt and Midwestern heartland, while generally, wealthier neighborhood stores offer more options for “eco-conscious” shopping than stores in poorer neighborhoods. With few exceptions, the cheaper the product, the more likely it is that the company that manufactured it will have engaged in “greenwashing.”

April 25, 2017

Easy, natural spring cleaning tips

April 25, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

Well Earth Day came and went and if you were in the US and blinked, you’d have missed the mainstream media coverage that marked the moment. No problem: as I wrote in a blog post to commemorate last year’s Earth Day, we don’t really need it anymore. Considering the near-steady diet of alarming environmental news we are treated to --natural disasters both looking and realized; contaminants in the water; stubborn spates of denial about the death-spiral of the fossil fuel industry era (tar sands pipelines, anyone?) –, we passed the need for Earth Day about 30 or so years ago...

Wanting to live more ethically is the first step in a long process of making it happen, and you may always fall short in the end. Reducing consumption is an important part of being green(er), and it may be the hardest one for many people to actually put into action.

Small steps are better than no steps at all.

This post offers one small – yet important – way you can reduce waste in your own home...

April 16, 2017

Natural Bathroom Cleaning Tips→

April 16, 2017/ Kelly Pemberton

guest post from Erica Garlands, with slideshow by Modern Bathroom

(this is the first post in a 3-part series on Green Cleaning)

Did you know that there are 150 chemicals found in the home that are connected to allergies, birth defects, cancer and physiological disorders? And most of these chemicals are found in bathroom-cleaning products! Bathrooms are high traffic rooms, and obviously need to be kept clean due to the high level of germs that can collect in bathrooms. There are many cleaning options available to us, many containing harmful products, but there are ways to effectively clean by only using natural ingredients. Some of these natural ingredients include grapefruit, lemons, salt, and baking soda.

May 26, 2016

My favorite DIY green cleaners: safe, effective, and easy to make at home

May 26, 2016/ Kelly Pemberton

Most household cleaning agents contain harmful chemicals that can cause a range of health problems. One set of ingredients in these cleaners is especially problematic, because they are known to cause cancer in humans and animals: formaldehyde and formaldehyde releasers. Sometimes formaldehyde is not actually used as an ingredient in cleaning solutions, but is present as a by-product. For this reason, it does not appear in the list of ingredients; instead, you’ll know that a product contains formaldehyde if you see the names DMDM hydantoin, or 1,4 dioxane listed among a product’s ingredients. It may also be present if other chemical ingredients like formalin, formalith, methanol, methyl aldehyde, methylene glycol, methylene oxide, paraform, or BFV appear in the ingredient list.

On the other hand, you can always make your own green cleaning products.

By making your own household cleaners, you can not only have more control over the ingredients that go into them, thereby reducing your exposure to hazardous chemicals, you can also save money in the process (especially by buying them in bulk).

Here are a few of my favorite DIY green household cleaners.