Green Options

[Creative Commons photo by sarae]

Your dishwasher is spic and span, and it’s starting to make your cluttered refrigerator look a little bit…well…gross. Don’t despair! We’ve got you covered with some Earth-friendly fridge-cleaning tips. Not only does cleaning out the fridge keep things sanitary, you can do your part to make it more energy efficient!

We know to only run the dishwasher when we have a full load. We also know that there are lots of great options for Earth-friendly dishwashing detergents. What we don’t always think about though, is good old maintenance. Nothing wastes water like unloading your dishwasher to find you have to wash half or all of the load over by hand. Giving your dishwasher a good Spring cleaning will help your dishes come out free of debris by removing gunk and buildup from all the innards.

The WebMD Health eHome is a a new educational collaboration between WebMD and Healthy Child Healthy World and is sponsored by Seventh Generation.  It provides you the tools to discover how to create a safer and healthier home for you and your children.  While many of the writers here provide daily information on how to provide your family a safe environment both outside and inside your home the WebMD Health eHome promises to provide more wonderful information on how to rid your home of health hazards.  With a variety of tools it may even enlighten some ECP readers on new ways to improve their quality of life.

I’ve been posting lately about the treasure of beautiful, hand-sewn vintage quilts that I found in my Mama’s house, and the shocking conditions in which they’d been stored: stuffed in a closet, stuffed in a garbage bag, with MOTHBALLS! Another that my mother had put aside for me was folded up, hung on a HANGER, and then stuffed inside a garbage bag.

The quilts were all visibly worn-looking, weak, and discolored along their fold lines. On my Nana’s friendship quilt, some of the color of the embroidery that served as the signature of the women who pieced the quilt had bled onto other parts of the quilt that they’d been shoved against for thirty years. The quilt on the hanger is in the worst shape–the plastic had stuck to it in a few spots (it’s a nine-patch my Nana made in the 1970s, out of polyester), and it didn’t really want to completely unfold anymore. I have a master’s in library science that focuses on archival management, and I sew, and y’all? I FREAKED. OUT.

The thing is, my family doesn’t hate these quilts and want them to die. The recognize that these quilts are works of art, loving legacies from women long gone from us, and records of our ancestry, and they very much want to treasure them and preserve them for future generations–they were just doing an ass job of it.

Here’s how to not be such an ass.

My mother hates odor. She’s not like “eww, that smells like garbage.” She’s like, “eew, there’s an undertone of fake gardenia in that fabric softener.”

Well, not exactly, but really close. My mother, like many others walks out of retail stores that smell like heavy cleansers and would sooner live in filth than in a house with Pine Sol. I’m not as sensitive as my mother, but I’ve tried to keep my house friendly t her and others like her.

Today I cleaned the house from top to bottom with EcoDiscoveries products and guess what my mother smelled? Nothing.

You purchase organic cotton bedding and pesticide-free fruits and vegetables.  At home, you use a vacuum with a HEPA filter and make sure that your children wash their hands before eating.  But are you hiding skeletons under the sink or in the closet?  I’m referring to chemical-based, conventional cleaning products – those bottles usually marked, per federal regulation, with a skull-and-crossbones logo.

In the US, accidental ingestion of chemical-based cleaning products accounts for many trips to the emergency room and calls to the Poison Control Center.  Bleach is a strong corrosive and may cause pulmonary edema or coma if ingested, while ammonia can damage the eyes, respiratory tract, and skin.  These aren’t the only harmful ingredients in conventional cleaning products, but manufacturers purposely omit many dangerous ingredients from labels.  Additionally, chemical cleaning products end up in our waterways, soil, and landfills, where they contribute to oxygen-depleted ocean dead-zones, release harmful gases into our air, and poison both humans and wildlife.

Editor’s note:  We are proud to have Seventh Generation be one of our sponsors, and the following post is one example why.

Regular home cleaning contributes to better health for your family and visitors.  Many popular chemical-based cleaning products, however, contain powerful chemical toxins that may negatively affect human health.  In an increasingly polluted world, a greater number of families strive to make our homes relatively safe havens in which our families thrive – not sources of toxic chemical loads.

Consumers and health officials have long ignored the dangers of conventional cleaning products.  Clever marketing campaigns – not to mention memories of our mothers bleaching every hard surface in the home – promote the familiarity and effectiveness of conventional cleaning products.  We’re often unaware of the many harmful ingredients in chemical-based formulas, and manufacturers frequently make ingredient labels inconspicuous.  Luckily, growing interest in healthy living has resulted in a large number of new and effective eco-friendly cleaning solutions.

I love a clean house. There, I’ve said it. I like walking into my house, breathing in deeply and smelling the pure fresh smell of Amonia nothing. Seriously, there is no odor whatsoever. My windows are practically invisible and, because I’m cheap environmentally aware there is no cleanser involved.

Ya’ huh! It’s totally not a typo. I just found out the most amazing thing, microfiber. You can get microfiber rags at auto supply stores in really dull shades of grey, red or beige. Microfiber is already adored by green moms who use cloth diapers. You can also pick them up at specialty Grocery stores like Whole Foods or Trader Joes for a little more cash but it much more appealing colors. Jeff thinks everyone should tuck a towel in their pocket (rumor has it that Jeff wears cargo pants).

Rain, rain, go away.   Come again some other day…
Mold, mold, meet your end.  Never, ever come again!

A couple days ago, I recounted my story about how I was forced to abandon my abode (a small tent) due to a blight of mold.  The old children’s song of the first lyric is what Pittsburgh’s been singin’ all summer.  The second is a little ditty I’ve been singin’, ever since I kissed that tent goodbye.

I haven’t tossed the tent in the garbage (that wouldn’t be very sustainable!)  I do plan on redeeming it: even if it ends up stained by the mold, its function shouldn’t be reduced by the event.  Since my close encounter of the fungal kind, I’ve been doing research about methods for removing mold.  Read on for sustainable solutions for dealing with moldy clothing.

Some days I fall victim to the green noise syndrome; I’m so overloaded by the green options all around me I don’t know where to go. Bath and cleaning products are one place I always thought I had it right. If I buy the organic, I’m good to go. Or am I?

I just learned last week that in March, Seventh Generation, Method, and other companies that produced green cleaning products were under scrutiny by the Organic Consumers Association. When testing around a hundred “cosmetic, personal care and household cleaning formulas, [the Association] found that nearly 50% of them contained detectable levels of 1,4-dioxane, which is known to cause cancer in lab animals.” Method, Planet Ultra and Seventh Generation’s “natural” dish cleaning products were among those products that tested positive. All manufacturer’s who tested for 1,4 were asked to remove their “organic” and “natural” labels or they’d face a lawsuit. Just when I thought I was cleaning consciously, I have to go through another round of making change in my lifestyle.

Excerpted with permission from Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth and Baby Care by Jossey-Bass, A John Wiley & Sons Imprint.

For such a little person, a baby sure goes through a lot of laundry: diapers, bibs, sleepers, undershirts, blankets, sheets, socks, pants . . . and of course all the items the baby spits up on that also need to be cleaned—often. That’s why having a baby in the house turns the mundane washer and dryer into wonder machines of incredible convenience. This increase in laundry loads is also a good reason for you to focus your green efforts on the laundry room.

The Green Washing Machine

If you’re buying a new washer, remember to look for Energy Star models. Traditional top-loading washing machines use about forty gallons of water per load, whereas Energy Star washers use only about 25 gallons per load. That’s a 40 percent savings in water, which translates into an energy cost savings of almost 50 percent.10Make that new machine a front-loader. Front-loading machines work on a horizontal axis that saves both water and energy. A top-loading machine must be filled with water in order to keep the clothing wet and then an agitator swirls the water around, but a front-loading machine uses less water because the tub does not need to be filled completely; the tub itself rotates, making the clothes tumble in the water.