Sustainable Cleaning
It doesn’t matter if you are scrubbing the bathroom or cleaning the hob or the worst one, cleaning the windows. We all have our ‘favourite’ and least favourite household cleaning jobs, some people use it as a way to de-stress, we use it as a way to start arguments in our house about who does the most.
We have decided that if we are going to do the cleaning we might as well make it planet friendly.
There are plenty of brands who are making real moves to be more eco friendly and sustainable and many of them have decided to tick the style box along the way. We never thought we’d say this about cleaning products but since our cleaning shelf is looking a lot more elegant since we made the switch, we almost enjoy cleaning.
Highstreet independents
We started on the highstreet and refilled our existing containers with our local offering, we found items like handwash and washing up liquid were more readily available than things like glass cleaner and floor cleaner, but we did find some antibacterial spray and while we enjoyed not buying more plastic we didn’t find an eco friendly option in our branch so we decided to go for new but long term. You might have more luck on your high street and we most certainly advocate giving it a go.
Ocean Saver
Our next port of call was ocean saver, we liked the idea of this because you can go for either a starter kit with fresh bottles or the refill only option so you can use your existing bottles instead of totally starting fresh. Available from Tesco’s across the country or online, the ocean saver ethos is trying to reduce ocean plastic, hence the name. By 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish, we can’t think of a better reason to reduce our plastic consumption. Nicely scented and effective products, we particularly liked the kitchen degreaser in lemon kelp which left everything residue free and looking fresh.
£17.50 for a starter kit, five bottles and five product sachets from Ocean Saver.
We wanted to try the convenience of the postal option, we have seen adverts popping up everywhere. An eye catching option for us was home things, we love that these bottles are glass and while that might not be for everyone, in our house it fits in with our plan to replace as much plastic with glass as possible. Brightly colours edging on the bottles help you remember what is what and the top up tabs come in a letterbox friendly box. Very effective at doing exactly what they say which is cleaning things, that is allthings, baththings or shinythings. The fact that making their refill cleaning tabs produces 90% less CO2 emissions than a single-use bottle is a very good extra bonus.
£28 for the starter kit, three bottles and three cleaning tabs from gethomethings.com
Spruce
For comparison we also tried the Spruce home delivery service. We love their promise that for every starter kit purchased they collect and remove ocean-bound plastic waste which is equivalent to twenty-five plastic bottles. Another super sleek design that looks so good you won’t want to hide them away. Multipurpose or bathroom sprays are available and the refill sachets come in compostable packaging. The bathroom spray really tacked any grimey areas and left no residue.
Starter kit £19.99, two bottles and two cleaning sachets from Wearespruce.co.uk
Plant based sustainable cleaning products from The Botanist.
We all know there is a huge selection of cleaning products out there for every household cleaning job, usually two full aisles in any big supermarket. It can be an easy switch with a bit of planning. Next time you consider what you need for your home, think about a couple of things before making your choice. Can one product do more than one job? Can you make a more eco friendly and sustainable choice?
All eco friendly options we tried weren’t any less effective than the big brands we usually use, they all cleaned well, left no residue and did a great job.
Written by Emily F from the Buy Smarter Buy Greener Team