Green Clean: The Environmentally Sound Guide to Cleaning Your Home

This is a great find. If you have ever had any questions about cleaning your home and not poisoning yourself at the same time, help has arrived. Spotted over at Unbeige,

Green Clean is the definitive, step-by-step guide to cleaning better while using nontoxic, ecofriendly products.
Written by Linda Mason Hunter, Mikki Halpin, Green Clean is published by Melcher Media, which means that the book itself is a fully recyclable polymer (Bill McDonough's Cradle to Cradle was the same).

Chapters work room by room around your house and there is also a product guide and a "recipe" section.

Re-edited from an post originally published 07.13.05

Comments (9)

This book is OK. I own it and have used it once or twice. If you are already committed to green cleaning, this book is probably not super useful because a lot of it is dedicated to explaining why you should stop using chemicals. Many of the recipes also use Borax & washing soda, which are not always considered "green" ingredients and can be problematic if you have sensitive skin.

Abby and Liza - good on ya!Vinegar, water, lemon juice and bicarb of soda - all you need!

I often go by the baking soda and vinegar route, but I still haven't found any natural solutions to really disinfect.

I have pets, and have been reading that one of the safest cleaners to use around them is diluted plain chlorine bleach. Once it dries, it's harmless and as long as you dilute it, it's not too overpowering while you're cleaning. It also supposedly breaks down into non-harmful substances.

I'm open to change, but so far I'm not convinced to give up bleach. It's a miraculous disinfectant. I know chlorine bleach is usually considered the opposite of green, but I'm just not yet sold on the idea that it's really so bad or that peroxide would really be so much better.

Is this really terrible?

Chlorine is really not good for you. It makes carcinogenic byproducts when it reacts with organic materials (such as dirt), and I can't see it breaking down into less harmful substances, since it's an element. But I'm not a chemist. I'd be interested to find out where you read about this.

The only reason chlorine is in drinking water is that your chance of cancer from these byproducts is minimal compared to getting cholera or some other water borne disease from untreated water.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,986628,00.html

A 2 in one million chance of getting cancer doesn't seem high, but concentrations of these materials are far lower in drinking water than would occur using even diluted chlorine bleach as a cleaning product. So, why use it if you don't have to? Unless you live with immuno-compromised people, I don't think you really need to disinfect your home.

On the other hand, hydrogen peroxide, while not harmless, is also a disinfectant and eventually breaks down into water and oxygen.

k2:

Thanks for the info!

I just pieced together the very little I know (I'm not a chemist either!) from a lot of googling. From this, for instance, it sounds like chlorine bleach is a very mixed bag:

http://www.thegreenguide.com/docprint.mhtml?i=95&s=bleach

It's certainly toxic, but I still think it's worth keeping around for very limited use, for cleaning up raw meat juices (yuck!), for instance.

Moema, thanks for the article, it definitely cleared up the chemistry questions I had. I don't eat meat or have pets, so I really have no use for the stuff, especially since I've ruined clothes by using cleaners that contain bleach :(.

On a google search, I saw that pine oil and some citrus products can be used as disinfectants. I wonder if anyone has used these?