Biodegradable Household Products

Babies typically like to touch everything and then stick their hands in their mouths.  As a super-protective father, I need to live up to my reputation by eliminating nasty chemicals such as bleach from my house. Hence, I started my quest of banishing products with chemical agents.

First, I needed a cleaner for typical everyday cleaning, and GreenWorks Natural All-Purpose Cleaner seems to fit the bill. The packaging claims 99.93% natural, biodegradable ingredients, which seems much better than my old cleaner which was probably 99.93% chlorine bleach.  So far I haven’t put it to any heavy-duty use, such as cleaning the back of the fridge where alien life-forms take refuge, but it sure feels better to have Lia touch a surface cleaned by this product than the 409.

The next product we looked to make the switch was dishwashing liquid.  Karen brought home some organic detergent in the past, but the apple-scented fume from that product overloaded my senses and so nauseated me that I refused to do dishes.  Okay, okay, I admit that part of it wasn’t motivated by the nausea and it was a perfect excuse, but the fragrance was undeniably overpowering.  Recently we made the switch to GreenWorks Natural Dishwashing Detergent, which is 99% biodegradable, and emitted a more soothing aroma.

Now some of you may have been cajoled by the older generation into believing that the dishwasher is a dish storage device, but for the enlightened ones who realized that the dishwasher was invented for a reason other than racking dishes, dishwasher detergent is an essential part of the household. For a while I used Cascade, but the chlorine bleach in that product made me urgently look for an alternative, and that was when I came across Trader Joe’s Next To Godliness Automatic Dishwashing Detergent, the powder version. It contains no chlorine or phosphate and seems to work just as well as the Cascade.  Note that while I haven’t tried the liquid version, I heard it has an undesirable air de-freshener side-effect and doesn’t work as well.

Another surface that we grace our skin on daily is the Throne.  Not sure if you enjoy sitting in a puddle of bleach, but for myself, I prefer sitting in biodegradable material.  Well, I suppose there are biodegradable materials in the bathroom that I’d rather not sit on, but at least it won’t burn a hole in my pants or kill a million fish with one drop in the gutter.  Anyway, GreenWorks seems to have the GreenWorks natural toilet bowl cleaner which contains none of the toxic stuff.  Woot!

So I’m becoming greener everyday, and it’s all in the name of being a protective parent.  This is only the beginning.  As I encounter more ways of reducing toxic materials from the household, I will let you know!