What makes a cleaning product "eco-friendly"?

There are a lot of commercial eco-friendly cleaning products and online recipes for green cleaners out there. But a truly sustainable product needs to have more than "baking soda" listed on the ingredients. There are other things you need to watch out for. Here's some questions you might want to ask yourself:

Where do the items/ingredients come from?

Just because something is non-toxic when used in your home does not mean that it's production is also environmentally friendly. 

Is the manufacturer socially responsible?

In other words, does the manufacturer exploit the workers who mine/collect/make the product? 

How is the product packaged?

What I mean here is that sometimes the product inside the package is "green" but that green product is wrapped in multiple layers of junk. If you are buying a cleaning solution look for the concentrated form. A concentrate may be equivalent to 10, 20, or even 40 bottles of "ready to use" sprays. I have a cleaner that I use that can make 64 gallons of cleaner from one gallon of concentrate. That means I can do a lot of cleaning and I only have one bottle that I have to recycle.

What do they mean by "Biodegradable"?

Is the whole item biodegradable or only part of it? And how long does it really take to break down? If the product is ultimately flushed down the toilet or down the sink what kinds of effects will it have "down stream" before it breaks down. And after it breaks down, what's left? Are the byproducts toxic or harmful in any way?

Why is the manufacturer calling the product "Green"?

Sometimes green products are made of a little recycled material, but not very much. Or it is recycled, but not biodegradable so after you use it it's just going to end up in a landfill for a thousand years. Or one of the ingredients is environmentally friendly, but there are also toxic ingredients in it.

Buying green cleaning products is kind of like buying food. Just because some cookies are advertised as "Low Fat" doesn't make them healthy if they have extra sugar to compensate for the lower fat content. For food to be healthy it needs to be more than just "low fat."

Get the right information
So finding out all about all this is a difficult task. Don't despair. There is help out there.

See this video interview with Scot Case of terrachoice.com
GoodGuide.com is also a very good place to find information.

GoodGuide

You want non-toxic, environmentally friendly products from companies with good social and safety records. GoodGuide rates over 65,000 products based on these factors.

I use GoodGuide all the time to see if I'm purchasing good products. They even have an iPhone app. Check it out, you might find it useful.

http://www.goodguide.com/

The Two Most Important Environmental Lessons I Ever Learned

Discover has a site that I really like called Green Planet. They have sections and articles about almost every kind of eco-friendly topic. The site covers topics such as fashion and beauty, food and health, home and garden, as well as technology and travel. Almost everything we do impacts the environment in which we live. I learned this lesson years ago in two separate incidents.

Lesson One: Lowering My Consumption
In the mid-80s I took a trip to Tanzania. It's one of the poorest countries in the world. While I was there I stayed with some friends of a friend. I had a great time and got a chance to see all kinds of exotic wild animals such as giraffe's, zebras, a hippo, elephants, and others. But what really impacted me the most is that the people I was staying with had to be super careful about their consumption habits. The littlest thing impacted me the most. To this day it has changed the way I live my daily life. One night after dinner they were washing the dishes and I saw them washing a plastic sandwich bag. At first I didn't get it. "Why are you washing that?" I asked naively. But their answer was so obvious that I should have known. That's what really shook me up: the answer should have been obvious, but it wasn't. "We can't just run down to 7-Eleven and buy more. It's a four hour drive to the nearest store." And besides that, they didn't have a garbage service. They had to either bury, compost, burn, or drive all their refuse away.

But why should I be any different? Shouldn't I make the best use of the products I buy? Why can't I use a plastic sandwich bag until it's unusable. And it isn't just sandwich bags, it's everything. Because we have weekly garbage pickup we can't be bothered to wash and re-use plastic bags. But the reality is our garbage doesn't go that far away. We are throwing away far more than we need to. So I've learned to wash those flimsy sandwich bags and I've learned to compost. You can too, just read a book like Complete Book of Composte and get a little compost keeper for your kitchen (Norpro Ceramic Compost Keeper, White). You'll be on your way to a healthier garden and a healthier planet.

Lesson Two: Reducing My Impact
In the mid-90s I went on a week long backpacking trip in Yosemite. If you walk around out in the woods you might be like me and think you're taking care of the earth if you pack out what you pack in. As the slogan goes "leave only footprints, take only pictures." But on that trip our guide had what might seem like a strange rule: don't leave any footprints. We all had to walk in a line and stay on the trail. As it turns out, millions of people hike around in Yosemite and even though one person's footsteps won't hurt the forest, when you do that a million times you leave a wake of devastation in your trail. The grass can only bounce back so many times before it withers and dies. If all the hikers follow the same trail then all we end up with is a six inch wide dead strip instead of killing the whole place.

One human living out her life on this planet can't do much damage. The ecosystem in which we live can absorb anything we throw at it. The earth is huge and I'm a small part of it. Even if I drove a Hummer around all day and had a fire in my fireplace running constantly it wouldn't matter. But when six billion people do that same thing it's like all those hikers in Yosemite. We devour the earth like a swarm of locusts. One little locust can't eat very much, but when they swarm it becomes life threatening. One swarm in 2004 was 230km long and contained an estimated 69 billion locusts. We're no different, our collective impact on the ecosystem can have disastrous effects.

Our carbon footsteps are just like our physical footsteps in our national parks such as Yosemite. We all need to make a conscious effort to limit the damage we are causing.

Biodegradable (NOT)

I bought a "green" mop that also happens to be colored green. It is advertised as green because it's made out of recycled PET bottles. These are the kinds of bottles that you might get when you buy water or a soda. Although it is good that these bottles are recycled into a usable product (and the mops work nicely), the problem with PET mops (as opposed to pet rocks) is that they are still not biodegradable. So you recycle your water bottle so that it doesn't end up floating in a giant floating garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean.



But in the end, is a floating mop any better than a floating water bottle?

This is one reason that more and more people are advocating reduction rather than recycling.  Getting a water filter seems to be a better choice than buying bottled water.

You can get a water filter that attaches to your sink.












Or one that you fill and put in the fridge.