Green Clean Your Home: 160 simple, nature-friendly recipes which really work

By Manfred Neuhold

You want your home, your clothes and your car to be really clean.
You don't want to put harmful chemicals down the drains, nor to breathe them indoors.
And maybe you would like to save money at the same time, and to enjoy the creative satisfaction of making your own simple cleaning agents.
Not only does Austrian author Manfred Neuhold tell you what works, he explains in plain English WHY it works. Which means you can clean better…
Here are 160 easy, illustrated recipes to inspire you to make all your own basic cleaning products such as:
• washing up liquids
• rinse aids
• fabric conditioners
• toilet cleaners
• dishwasher powders
And the specialist stuff:
• anti-flea carpet cleaner
• wine stain remover
• car air fresheners
•   anti-mist window and mirror cleaners
•   sweat-mark removers
• car seat cleaners
• rust removers
• lingerie handwash liquid

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merlin Unwin Books
• Release date: May 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913159238

Manfred Neuhold

Manfred Neuhold is a professional author, renowned for his wide range of books on herbs and herbalism, permaculture and natural products, subjects on which he has written for over 25 years. He lives and works in Graz, Austria.

Book preview

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Glossary

PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 1 – The Short Philosophy of Cleaning

CLEANERS

Chapter 2 – Multi-Purpose Cleaners

KITCHEN

Chapter 3 – The Kitchen

BATHROOM

Chapter 4 – The Bathroom

WINDOWS

Chapter 5 – Windows

LAUNDRY

Chapter 6 – Laundry

WOODEN

Chapter 7 – Wooden Floors and Furniture

CARPETS

Chapter 8 – Carpets

FRESHENERS

Chapter 9 – Air Fresheners & Room Sprays

METALS

Chapter 10 – Cleaning Agents for Metals

CAR CLEANING

Chapter 11 – Car Cleaning

SOAPS

Chapter 12 – Make Your Own Soaps

Index

The Author

Also Published by Merlin Unwin Books

Copyright

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GLOSSARY

The word in bold below is the term we have used throughout the book for the following synonyms.

Caustic soda: sodium hydroxide, lye

Washing soda: sodium carbonate, soda crystals, soda powder

Bicarbonate of soda: baking soda, sodium bicarbonate

Cream of tartar: tartaric acid

Baking powder: cream of tartar mixed with bicarbonate of soda

Surfactant: a wetting agent, or tenside, one which reduces the surface tension. If coconut-derived, it is a coconut surfactant or tenside

OCCASIONAL MINOR ADJUSTMENTS TO SUIT YOURSELF

The environmentally-friendly products that you will buy to make the recipes in this book may vary slightly from shop to shop and manufacturer to manufacturer. With the exception of the soap-making on pages 202-203, don’t be afraid to add a little more, or sometimes less, water to your recipe to obtain the right consistency. It will not compromise the effectiveness of your finished product. You will quickly learn the exact proportions through experimentation.

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CHAPTER ONE

THE SHORT PHILOSOPHY

OF CLEANING

K

eeping your own environment clean – and how you do this – benefits the whole community

FEEL-GOOD CLEANING

HOW CLEAN DOES IT NEED TO BE? OPINIONS VARY…

It might be one of the unspoken consequences of the Fall of Man from Paradise: dirt. There is not a hint that Eve cleaned in Paradise. Adam, of course, didn’t either. But for whatever reason, dirt is a constant companion of mankind. There isn’t much good to say about dirt, except perhaps as the layer of dust on an old wine bottle. And no matter how many times you remove it, dirt keeps coming back.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why cleaning is often perceived as a negative activity. You clean because you have to. You rarely find pleasure in cleaning and when you do, you probably don’t like to admit it. It’s not considered particularly cool to be a passionate cleaning devil. Anyone who likes to clean and admits it is considered odd. 2

Cleaning is one of the last bastions of cultural identity. The way we clean is a clear reflection of cultural diversity. A manufacturer of wipes and scrubbers, who sells his products worldwide, will have looked into this carefully. The expectations of cleaning and wiping cloths vary from country to country. In the global village, everyone sweeps his own doorstep, but each in his own way, determined by tradition and culture.

In Central Europe and North America, the vacuum cleaner, cleaning bucket and mop are the main pillars of domestic cleanliness. But even here, there are differences: while Europeans mainly use a bucket, Americans rinse the mop directly in the sink. All, that is, except Americans with Hispanic roots: they clean like Europeans, with buckets but with lots and lots of water. What both have in common is the use of chemical cleaning agents, often in excessive quantities. What’s clean must smell clean. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why allergies are so widespread in these two cleaning cultures and are on the increase.

The market research carried out by our wipes manufacturer will have revealed further insights into cleaning behaviour. In southern European countries, a lot of water and chemicals are generally used for cleaning. Scandinavians, on the other hand, tend to clean dry and attach great importance to the environmental compatibility of their cleaning agents. Belgians and Dutch people click wide fabric cloth-heads onto poles and pull them over tiled floors and laminates – a method that is also favoured in Italy and Spain. The classic mop we are familiar with is almost unknown there.

People build their houses in different ways and with different flooring, according to the climate of the country. High humidity and stone floors require a different cleaning method to low humidity and wooden floors. Some countries with colder climates favour carpets.

The greatest influence on cleaning behaviour, however, is tradition – personified by the mother. The way mother cleans, so the children clean. And because about two-thirds of these cleaning children are female, this tradition is continuously passed on through the generations. With the increasing number of single households, the picture changes only slightly. 3

Cleaning is something that almost everyone does, only more or less regularly. It is important for well-being, because nobody likes to roll in the dirt. A clean apartment is an apartment in which you feel comfortable, where you literally feel at home.

But when it comes to standards of cleanliness, opinions differ widely. While some are satisfied with superficial cleanliness, maintained by regular vacuuming, floor wiping, toilet cleaning and wiping the shelves in the kitchen, others are constantly on the hunt for dust and streaks. The latter only feel comfortable in a hygienically clean environment. They not only use cloths and cleaning agents, but also disinfectant spray. Thus one could roughly separate the two types: the pragmatic cleaners and the passionate cleaners. Most of us will probably find ourselves somewhere between these two extremes.

However, cleaning can be more than the removal of constantly recurring dirt. Cleaning can help us look closely at our immediate living environment and sharpen our awareness of which things are important to us and which have merely accumulated over time. The important things are the ones treated with care and kept clean and in good condition. You like to clean these things because you like to use them. These are the items that are either regularly or constantly used and are therefore the focus of our attention. A thing that hasn’t been cleaned for two years is probably unnecessary, so the frequency of cleaning an object can be an important test when deciding what to keep and what to throw away

This act of cleaning – bringing order into one’s own environment – has another dimension. The Japanese, with their Zen Buddhist tradition of concentrating on the essential and consciously performing a particular activity, know ‘the way of cleaning’ as a spiritual exercise. This spiritual tradition, called ‘misogi’, sees the main purpose of meditation as cleaning within oneself. It can be seen as a form of psychotherapy by other means. One of the methods is to connect the ‘inner cleaning’ with the ‘outer cleaning’, ie. housework. The cleaning thus becomes a kind of active meditation. Concentrating on wiping various surfaces with a damp cloth frees up the mind from compulsive thoughts. The mind becomes an empty – and of course clean – vessel, ready to receive new thoughts in an orderly manner.

Important in this ‘misogi’ is cleaning with the bare hand and a damp cloth. If you 4wipe with sufficient pressure, the friction of the damp cloth creates water ions on a solid surface. This is important because life is largely based on water ions. Healthy air contains many water ions. So ‘misogi’ leads to a healthy environment. It goes without saying that only pure water without industrial detergents is used.

This approach to cleaning is widespread in Japan. Perhaps it also helps that Japanese apartments are very small, and the amount of dirt produced is concentrated in one small room. So you have to clean often to keep the little apartment clean.

This Japanese ‘way of cleaning’ is one way of looking at the job: as an exercise of mental relaxation. It could start to turn an ordinary, routine or even dreaded task into something that can find the cleaner themself equally improved, through carrying the job out with respect.

Of course cleaning is essential to our well-being and health. And this brings us to the main topic of this book: cleaning agents, detergents that make cleaning easier but do not harm our health. Neither our own health nor that of the environment. Everyone has the right to create grime. But everyone also has a responsibility to remove their grime in a way that does not harm anyone else.

CLEANING CAN DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH

I

ndustrially-produced cleaning products often contain substances that you don’t want in your living environment.

CLEANING DOES NOT MEAN DISINFECTING

In Western Europe alone, currently around 70,000 products in the field of detergents, cleaning agents and disinfectants are approved for household use.

The average per capita consumption of cleaning products in Germany, for example, is around eleven kilograms per year. Most of it ends up in the sewage, but the rest is distributed around our homes, our clothes and our bodies. That could lead to the 5conclusion that we are particularly clean. However, because industrially-produced cleaning agents usually contain a whole range of substances that not only guarantee hygienic cleanliness but at the same time have side effects on our health, the question arises: is our dazzlingly clean living environment, which smells of synthetic aromas, really a healthy environment for us? Chemists from environmental and consumer protection organisations regularly examine the cleaning chemicals available on the market. Many products contain combinations of substances for which the term ‘poison cocktail’ is perhaps not entirely inappropriate.

Especially in those products that smell strongly, toxins lurk. Very few products contain the scent of natural additives such as lemon oil. The vast majority only mimic natural freshness with the help of synthetically assembled molecules, which primarily act on our noses and, even if it is a good product, make only a minor contribution to the cleaning performance of the product. This is one of the differences between natural aromas and synthetic fragrances: the latter only smell strongly at best and at worst cause irritation to the skin, eyes and respiratory tract. But natural aromatics from, for example, essential lemon oil, have immense fat-dissolving power.

It is very difficult for consumers in a supermarket to read from the list of ingredients the proportion of substances that are harmful to health or even toxic. Even if ‘bio’ is emblazoned on the packaging in giant letters, this is no guarantee of a ‘healthy’ cleaning agent. In contrast to its use in foodstuffs, the term ‘organic’ in the case of cleaning agents, is not tied to any particular criteria.

What should a cleaning agent be able to do? It should loosen dirt and make it easy to remove in a solution. What a cleaning agent does not need to do – and in the interests of a healthy living environment should not be able to do – is to disinfect your home. The disinfection of a room is necessary in public toilets and clinics, but certainly not in a normal house with residents without infectious diseases. The fear of bacteria lurking everywhere is not based on scientific knowledge, but on the influence of the advertising of the cleaning agent industry.

Bacteria are actually everywhere. In our body we carry a considerable amount of them around with us too. Very few of them are harmful to our health, and a 6functioning immune system can cope with them easily. Many types of bacteria actually promote our health; some are even vital for us. So anyone who treats all bacteria the same and eliminates them chemically, does no good for himself or his health. On the contrary, it appears that children who grow up in a germ-free household suffer much more from a weakened immune system and a whole range of allergies than those whose immune system is allowed to deal with bacteria and germs in a natural way. It is said for good reason that children who grow up with pets are the healthiest children. The immune system of a child who often comes into contact with a dog’s tongue is challenged and strengthened. It will be able to cope with other, greater challenges in the future. There is increasing scientific evidence that children cannot develop their immune system sufficiently in an environment that is too clean.