Top 6 tips for finding the best zero waste cleaning products

In this article we give you 6 tips to consider when you are shopping for the best zero waste cleaning products. There is a lot of talk better health and using natural ingredients for cleaning. Its explore that a bit here too.

What really matters when it comes to choosing the best for your home is different for each person. Not everyone has time (or desire) to DIY household cleaning products. Not everyone can afford to buy readymade cleaning products. There is never a one-size fits all solution.

Tip #1 – Beware of greenwashing.

There is a lot of greenwashing in the industry. Greenwashing is when a company falsely conveys the impression about their products are more environmentally and natural then they really are.

I recently saw a commercial for ‘green’ mascara. Not green in color. According to the brand, green as is eco-friendly and made with 99 percent natural-origin ingredients with packaging made from 95% recycled plastic.

I spent a bit of time on their website but the answers about the ingredients were vague and each answer raised more questions which involved clicking through to more links. We do not all have time to do that extensive research. It is much easier to just believe the marketing message in the commercial.

Maybe the ingredients in that mascara is really good and natural but making that decision for yourself is not easy. My point is that all products, no matter what category, can be subject to greenwashing. Do your diligence when you can, and when you don’t have the time, follow the advice someone you trust, someone who know who takes time to do the research.

Don’t get duped by misleading information. Let us guide you to making good choices for your cleaning supplies.

It all started with the straw and plastic bags. One by one, people started to question the waste made from these very common items. Now, it’s hard to find someone who hasn’t heard about declining a plastic straw at a restaurant or taking your own tote into a store. The same is happening with the products we use on and around our body.

The zero-waste lifestyle is now becoming part of our regular routine. Plastic free and package free products are being offered in large and small stores around the globe.

Lets the discuss best zero waste cleaning products available today and how to choose the best brands.

Tip #2 – Know your companies.

The best tip is to buy from companies you know are doing the right thing. Those who choose to use good, clean, natural ingredients and thoughtful packaging.

Research the company you currently buy from and if they make the cut, great – keep buying form them. If you find they are not meeting your personal standards, then seek out another company. Plenty of companies are standing up and doing the right thing with packaging, ingredients, social issues, environmental concerns and overall caring for planet and people before profits.

Not sure about what the company is doing or stands for? Ask them. Those who are transparent about their ingredients and sustainable practices are happy to share. Reach out on their website chat, email them or call. The phone still makes phone calls, right?

Tip #3 – DIY, if you want.

Natural cleaning is more than just vinegar and baking soda, essential oils or soaking orange peels to make your own kitchen spray cleaner. We might want to be Pinterest perfect with our cleaning practices, but let’s be real – we are busy people, we want a clean home and do not want to spend all day doing it.

Take a trip down the aisle. Not the wedding aisle, the cleaning aisle. Plenty of labels say (usually in bold print) organic, all natural, plant based, environmentally friendly. The key to know is to read the ingredients listed on the back. Unfortunately, the cleaning products industry is not legally required to list the ingredients nor disclose them on their website.

If that bothers, you then you might need to find a bit on time to make up a few of your own cleaners. That time spent to prepare and label some spray bottles and shaker cans will give you piece of mind to know you are choosing the best ingredients around your home and family.

Make it a party with a few friends. Each person gets assigned a task. Each person chooses something to bring and brings enough for the group:

1. Ingredients
2. Bottles (sprayers and shakers)
3. Scrubbers
4. Rags
5. Labels and markers
6. Cute product caddy or bin

Make it a Wine Wednesday event if you want. This act of making your own natural cleaning products can be fun and informative.

This article is like a mini zero waste and eco-friendly cleaning products buying guide. Bookmark this article for your future reference.

Tip #4 – Break it down by room.

For me, it is easier to look room-by-room, then by product when it comes to cleaning the house.

Bathroom: eco-friendly cleaning the loo

The toilet gets the most use so, lets address it first. Each time we flush the toilet, tiny water droplets are pushed into the air and those droplets contain bacteria from what’s inside the toilet. The toilet space in your bathroom can be the most germ-infested a space in your house. Setting up for easy cleaning can make it quick to clean the toilet a few times a week, keeping the spread of bacteria to a minimum.

Make your own bathroom cleaner bucket.

Keep your cleaning supplies handy and in one spot for quick cleaning. DIY cleaning products can be made using baking soda, vinegar, citric acid powder, a scrub brush, and a pumice stone are for use in the entire house and effective toilet cleaners.

TOILETS:

Pumice stones are affordable and fantastic at wonderful chemical free stain remover for stubborn stains and mineral deposits on the porcelain. The pumice stone will not scratch the porcelain, so don’t worry about that.

When you want to buy a readymade cleaner, companies like Seventh Generation and Better Life offer toilet bowl cleaners. You will still need a brush to scrub the cleaner in the bowl and rim. These come in plastic bottles.

If you want to reduce your plastic waste and use natural ingredients, opt for toilet tablets. There are many companies producing these single drop tablets that fizz and bubble in the water, helping to remove the grime. A quick search on Etsy or online for toilet bowl tablets will pull up many options. Depending on how dirty the toilet is, you will still want a brush to move the cleaner around and remove the dirt inside the bowl and under the rim.

The same natural ingredients in the cleaning bucket can be used can be used to clean the shower and bathroom sink also. Conventional cleaning products for toilet bowl cleaning can contain toxic chemicals and not recommended to use in shower and sinks, it may damage the surface and grout.

SINKS/SHOWERS:

When you have a mineral build up around your sink faucet or in the shower. Wet the area, sprinkle with citric acid powder, top with a bit of baking soda. The bubbling action will occur and works to remove the buildup. Rinse once the bubbles have stopped. Wipe and be amazed by the shine.

Keeping ingredients around is easier AND cheaper than continuously buying a product marketed to clean a specific area. But when you want to buy a ready-made cleaner, choose a refillable option when possible and one made without dyes, bleach or fragrance. The ingredients have been linked to being hormone disruptors. Your health is more important than the ‘smell’ of clean. Many people equate the scent of bleach (or other colorful cleaners) with cleanliness. This fact was proven by the makers of Febreze room spray. Read the Power of Habit book by Charles Duhigg. It is a great read!

The gist of the Febreze story is that when the product bombed in 1996, the marketing team decided to make Febreze a fun part of cleaning, at the end of the cleaning routine. They added more perfume, giving it its own distinct scent. Then they began to market Febreze spray as the ‘nice smell that occurs at the end of the cleaning routine’. They turned a scent eliminator into an air freshener, the finishing touch to the cleaning ritual.

Febreze was relaunched in 1998. Housewives started craving the Febreze scent and the desire to make everything smell as nice as it looked. Within two months sales doubled. The habit loop science worked and has worked to push Febreze sales to over $1 billion per year and available in a number of products like kitchen spray, candles and more.

 

The company admits the success of Febreze is due to the ads they created to piggyback on an existing habit, not having go make a new one. If you want to learn about how our habits are formed in our brain without us realizing it, watch this 18-minute video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOPlCbCxaFA&ab_channel=GoogleZeitgeist

Not everyone wants scent. Many are allergic and have multi-chemical sensitives to scents, even natural scents and essential oils.

WASHING HANDS:

Hand soap is a much-used product in the bathroom, but you may not want your hands to smell like a ‘spring mountain rain’. There are unscented refillable hand wash options that can be used as unscented soap, or you can add a few drops of your favorite essential oils too.

Liquid hand soap is nice and easy to use but it also leaves behind a big plastic jug that may, or may not, end up being recycled. If you want refill options for your foaming hand soap dispensers but don’t want to make your own soap, check out this hand wash concentrate bar. It dissolves to make a gallon of hand soap and comes packaged in a paper wrapper. No plastic packaging or waste is one step closer to a zero-waste routine.

Bar soaps will never go out of style. They work great, last a long time and do not harbor germs, like many people think. There have been a few large studies of the questions. Scientist intentionally contaminated their hands with about five billion bacteria, including Staph and E. coli. The scientists then used a bar of soap to wash their hands and had a second person wash using the same bar of soap.

The conclusion was that bacteria did not transfer to the second user and the level of bacteria that may occur on bar soap, even under extreme usage conditions does not constitute a health hazard. Soap and water have been proven effective at cleaning viruses and bacteria, so not washing due to misinformation can be harmful to your health.

Kitchen: zero waste cleaning

The main character in the kitchen: dish soap. Bar dish soap is making a comeback and for good reason – bar soaps work!

Hand dishing washing can be a chore without the right tools.

Cloths are easy to wash and keeping a few around make keeping them clean and available is easy. Get used to replacing your used dish cloth every day and washing them in your laundry with your other kitchen rags and your stock never runs low. Dish cloths and sponges has lots of crevasses and take longer to dry and have lots of places for bacteria to hide.

For deep cleaning of your sponges, place it in the microwave. First making sure it contains no metal threads and wet it thoroughly, so it does not catch fire in the microwave.

Researchers have found that sponges retain hundreds of bacteria even when ‘cleaned’ regularly. Not all bacteria are bad so no need to panic but the gist is that just because the sponge looks clean does not mean it is clean. It is recommended to throw away your used sponge and replace it with a new one every month. That seems like a lot of waste and even more wasted money.

Scrub brushes come in a variety of sizes and texture. Long handles, short handles, no handles, made from coconut coir, silicone, copper, – there are plenty of option to meet your needs. It may take you a purchase or two to find your ideal fit, but once you find it, hand washing dishes will be much easier. Dish brushes and scrubbers made with synthetic bristles shed moisture faster, so they don’t harbor bacteria or develop any offensive odors.

DISH SOAP:

Dish soap bars usually have a few effective ingredients that will cut grease and grime without being harsh on your skin. All natural is good for your health and dish bars generally come package free or with minimal cardboard box packaging. This zero waste dish soap is all natural, made with four ingredients: Coconut Oil, Shea Butter, Olive Oil Pomace, Sea Salt. That might not seem like it would be powerful enough to cut grease, but salt is highly effective at doing just that.

Hand dish washing without harsh chemicals is good for your hands and the planet, since all it all washes down the drain. When you can choose a biodegradable formula and one designated as septic safe.

If you prefer liquid dish soap, try diluting the brand you currently use, and you may be pleasantly surprised on how many more washes you get from one bottle. Dish washing tablets are also available now. Although the price point is a bit higher than most liquid and bars, it is a way to eliminate the plastic waste from your kitchen cleaning routine.

Laundry Room

PLASTIC FREE LAUNDRY DETERGENT:

There is a huge selection of laundry soap options now more than ever before. Liquid, powder, sheets, balls, nuts are just a few that come to mind. Laundry is something we do weekly (or daily) and as long we wear clothes, we will be doing laundry. I don’t see myself living in a nudist colony anytime soon, so finding the best plastic free laundry soap made without harsh chemicals is important to me.

As a person with sensitive skin, I prefer a laundry detergent with plant-based ingredients and one definitely containing no dyes and fragrance. An ecofriendly cleaning product for my clothes is just as important as one I use to clean my home.

Because I also consider myself a good steward of the planet, I want a laundry detergent with minimal packaging and preferably it is compostable packaging so it can be placed in our home compost bin.

Soap nuts meet those requirements and are non-toxic but have a slight learning curve. The small cotton bag of soap nuts needs to be removed after each wash before placing the clothes into the dryer. Some people feel like they are not strong enough at removing stains or combating pet and teenage stick odors, but they might work great for you.

Laundry detergents work differently from house to house because of the many combinations of types of water and machines. If you are interested in trying a liquid product without plastic packaging, take a look at this one with natural ingredients + plastic free shipping. The company is also carbon neutral through the purchase of carbon offset credits.

Laundry is not all about reducing waste. It is about getting the clothes clean! Sometimes those ingredients that are intended to clean don’t clean, they mask the odor or coat the fibers making clean an optical illusion.

Did you know that military fatigues should not be washed in any laundry detergent containing optical brighteners? The chemical used to make clothes ‘appear’ to be more vivid, whiter and brighter actually coat clothing fibers with fluorescent particles turning ultraviolet light into a visible light. That may be fine for you but for military personnel this can be deadly.

Night vision goggles can pick up the ultraviolet light in the fibers, making the soldier visible. To add to that bad news, the optical brighter can rub off onto your skin, which may lead to skin irritations or worse and it has been found survive through wastewater treatment facilities ending back out into our water supply.

STAIN REMOVERS:

Stain removers have come along way, but some old fashion remedies still work well. The combination of fabrics and the stain culprit will determine your best method for stain removal. Even bleach has its limitations with removing stains.

Bleach alternative

If you like using bleach and are willing to try its natural sibling (and give your lungs and body a break from the toxicity of bleach), try sodium percarbonate. It is oxygen bleach and works wonders for soaking out stains and whitening dull fabrics. Soaking is the key word here. The longer the oxygen can work on the stain the better results. Soak overnight when possible.

Vinegar

Soak the stain in vinegar, then a soap and water rinse work for many types of stain like tea, coffee and tomato. Add some salt to the vinegar for mildew and sweat stains.

Laundry sticks

For quick stain removal, try a Laundry Stain Remover bar. Carry one in your car, put one in your office desk and have one handy in the laundry room for those stains you don’t notice when they happen. The faster you can treat a stain the better. Also, make sure the stain is out before placing the garment in the dryer. The heat from the dryer can set the stain for good.

 

Tip #5 – The tools make the task

Cleaning Tools: zero waste options

Cleaning up can also make more for us to clean up. Think of all the disposable items in your currently routine. Paper towels, moldy sponges, plastic bag for trash, empty plastic bottles, spray bottles.

Towels & rags

Dish towels do not need to be purchased with the tag that says, “Dish Towels”. An old towel or sheet can be cut into squares and used just as effectively. Same can be used as cleaning rags. Cloth diapers and cotton blankets can be very absorbent and make great substitutes to conventional dish towels for drying and scrubbing.

Toothbrush

Don’t toss out your toothbrush at the end of its life of cleaning your teeth. Pop it into your cleaning caddy and use it so clean out the tight spaces around your faucet, corners in your shower, and inside of drains.

Cleaning products works best with the right cleaning tools, so think outside the box and reuse items you already have around.

Shaker cans

A great reuse for a powder sugar shaker can (really, how often do you use that can powder your desserts) or a parmesan shaker container work great for sprinkling out baking soda. Making the application of natural cleaning products simply makes the habit much more likely to stick, especially if you want to try making your own cleaning products.

Rather than rushing out to buy a new natural cleaning tool, it’s always best to use what you have until it breaks or needs replacing. Although going plastic free in our life is generally the healthier option, reusing an item until its end has far more reaching benefits.

Tip #6 – Determine your why.

All-purpose cleaners have a pretty descriptive name. They can be used almost anywhere and clean up a plethora of messes.

Rubbing alcohol, drinkable alcohol, vinegar all makes an effective all-purpose cleaning spray. The question is always, why do you need an all-purpose spray?

Need some extra umph…

For shining up or needing some extra cleaning power, a general all purpose cleaning spray is easy to mix up in any spray bottle. If you prefer to buy, look for brands who choose better ingredients. Beware, many brands use white vinegar with added scent and sell it to you for a much higher price than the cost of a gallon of vinegar.

Here is the ingredients list for Mrs. Meyers Multi Surface Cleaner. You decide if you want to spray down the surfaces you touch with this list of ingredients:

Water; Decyl Glucoside; Fragrance; Geraniol; Linalool; Ocimum Basilicum (Basil) Oil ; Carum Petroselinum (Parsley) Seed Oil ; Piper Nigrum (Black Pepper) Seed Oil; ethylene brassylate; linalool; gamma-undecalactone; geraniol; methyl decenol; 3-hexenol; methyldihydrojasmonate; tetramethyl acetyloctahydronaphthalenes; Ethanone, 1-[(3R,3aR,7R,8aS)-2,3,4,7,8,8a-hexahydro-3,6,8,8-tetramethyl-1H-3a,7-methanoazulen-5-yl]-; dipropylene glycol; Lauryl Glucoside; Sodium Citrate; Sodium Methyl 2-Sulfolaurate; Citric Acid; Capryleth-4; Tetrasodium Glutamate Diacetate; Methylisothiazolinone; Benzisothiazolinone

Sanitizing

If you need to sanitize after cutting raw chicken or meat on your counter or a wood cutting board, those ingredients won’t sanitize. You can disinfect with hydrogen peroxide or vinegar but to remove the growth of the bacteria and viruses, sanitizing with a diluted amount of bleach is necessary. Do not use scented bleach, it is not food safe.

According to the USDA, the only way to sanitize a wood cutting board is to soak the wood cutting board in a bleach bath and allow it to sit for 3-to-4 minutes. The bleach bath solution is a mix of 1 tablespoon unscented liquid chlorine bleach to 1 gallon of water. After the soak, rinse the board for about one minute with clean water and dry worth a clean towel or air dry.

I do not prefer to use bleach, but I have yet to find another safe alternative to bleach when it comes to sanitize after raw meat.

For non-wood cutting boards, they can be washed in the dishwasher and will be sanitized from the high temperature.

Technology

Technology has brought us new options in the cleaning space. Force of Nature makes a small appliance that converts salt, water & vinegar into a multi-purpose cleaner & EPA registered disinfectant that kills 99.9% of germs.

Food for Thought

Cleaning correctly might feel overwhelming, but it is pretty basic.

Tried and true: soap & water

Don’t overthink it and know that the only time you need to really plan is when sanitizing after someone who is sick or cleaning up after preparing raw meat, poultry and fish. So, adding a Meatless Monday to your meal planning can also reduce your cleaning time.