Kitchen Cleaning Supplies

Because the kitchen is one of the busiest rooms in the house and the place where 99.9% of our food should be eaten, unless it’s my household, which means it can be the room with the most bacteria as a result. You know, it’s crazy because even though you cannot see the dirt and crumbs and all of the food byproducts that might be floating around the kitchen, it is certainly present in your kitchen, my kitchen, and everybody else’s kitchen surfaces as tiny bacteria. We all know there are plenty of cleaners that we can use that are toxic and downright harmful, not only for ourselves but for the environment, so really let’s try to use environmentally friendly cleaning supplies. I am also going to let you in on what I consider to be my kitchen cleaning and general cleaning super-secret.

Okay, to start with, let’s get rid of the toxic cleaners altogether. Just remember this, if your eyes water and your throat starts to feel like it is closing up and you start to get nauseated, that is probably not a good thing as far as products to use in your kitchen. We are really looking at items that contain ammonia, bleach, and other toxic chemicals. Even if you use these products in small amounts, while that may be okay, if you have little kids or pets around it’s probably worse on them because of the size of their bodies and underdeveloped immune system. Don’t forget, even though these cleaners do a good job cleaning and have that negative affect on your body, just think of what they do to the environment, especially when we start to wash them down the drain. If your neighborhood is like mine, you see little signs over the drains in the streets that say: Caution, water drains to streams that have fish. The bottom line is, do not start your own indoor air pollution when for most of us that live in larger cities, the outdoor air pollution is already bad enough. Okay, I haven’t forgotten about my super cleaning secret, but we will get to that shortly.

I’m sure that most of you know that you can make a lot of your own cleaning solutions, and initially in the kitchen what I like to do is just take plain old hot water and wipe down all the countertops and appliance and cabinet faces first before I start in with my regular cleaning and disinfecting routine. There are a lot of environmentally friendly cleaning products that can be made with baking soda, white vinegar, eucalyptus or lavender oils, lemons, and even olive oil. One of my favorite all-purpose cleaning scrubs, which is great in the kitchen and even in the bathroom for surface cleaning, uses baking soda and a liquid soap to make kind of a paste and then just spread some of the paste on half of a cut lemon and use that for cleaning your surfaces. You will be amazed at how nice the surfaces come out and obviously will smell very nice. Just wipe these kitchen surfaces clean with a damp cloth when you’re done. If you keep your eyes open and some of your larger home repair and home services isle at your grocery stores, you will notice lots of new environmentally friendly, green cleaning supplies. Anything from dish soaps to household cleaners to laundry soaps and even baby products that are safe for drains, sewers, and even safe for just the general environment which is really what we are looking to use. The nice thing with these products is that most of their containers are biodegradable, and though we may throw them in our garbage cans and they eventually end up in the landfill, over a short period of time they will not be taking up the room that will be taken up by most of the other plastic bottles and containers.

If you want to think about kitchen cleaning supplies and trying to be environmentally friendliness, it is a lot easier than you think, just keep your eyes open and do your part to keep our planet and your living environment as safe as possible. Oh yeah, my kitchen cleaning and general purpose secret that I was going to tell you about earlier; I will tell you what, it is the most amazing product that I have ever seen for some stubborn stains in the kitchen and other surfaces, including hard water stains on shower doors. That product is the “Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.” This product is absolutely amazing and will be the best $2 or $3 investment that you will spend on any of your home or kitchen cleaning supplies.