DIY Natural Cleaning Products: Safe and Eco-Friendly Solutions for Your Family

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Keeping a clean home is essential for both our health and mental health. However, this doesn’t mean you have to use a wide range of products based on synthetic chemicals. You may have even found that some people in your home are sensitive to some of these ingredients.

Luckily, natural cleaning products are super easy to make, and can often end up being much cheaper than the standard alternatives. Below, we’ll look at some of the best eco-friendly cleaning products for your home.

DIY Natural Cleaning Products

Bicarbonate of Soda

Bicarb is a popular cleaning product in the eco-friendly world. It’s an amazing odour-eliminator and works well as an abrasive. You can use it for the following jobs:

• Sprinkling on carpet or upholstery

• Tipping down plug holes

• Popping a small bowl inside your fridge

• Cleaning surfaces – it can remove even the most stubborn marks!

Another way of combatting odours is to mix a few tablespoons of bicarb into a spray bottle of water. Spritz this on your furniture and it’ll quickly neutralise bad smells.

White Vinegar

White vinegar is another gold-standard cleaning product. Its acidity makes it effective as a degreaser, and it works well for cleaning glass and other shiny surfaces. Some popular jobs include:

• Cleaning glass hobs

• Cutting through mild grease on baking trays, hobs, etc.

• Getting limescale off showers, baths, sinks, etc.

•  Getting smells out of your washing machine

If you aren’t keen on the smell of vinegar, try adding a few drops of essential oils to help mask it a little, some favourites of mine include tea tree oil, lavender, lemongrass or eucalyptus. While you can use other types of vinegar, white is the best because there’s no risk of discolouration.

Also, you may see eco-friendly cleaning guides that recommend mixing vinegar and bicarb to clean and unclog drains. While the products react in an impressive way, they do in fact, cancel one another out meaning they aren’t tackling those cleaning jobs after all. When it comes to drain unclogging, you may see results due to the force created by the reaction but soda crystals are a far more effective eco option.

Citric Acid

Citric acid is, unsurprisingly, what’s found in citrus fruits. It can be made synthetically and comes in the form of a powder, which you can then use for cleaning jobs around the home. Citric acid is stronger than white vinegar, so it can tackle bigger jobs, such as:

• Cleaning toilets

• Descaling

• Polishing copper

• Mild disinfection (i.e., kitchen surfaces after food prep)

You can mix it with water to make a spray, or add a small amount of water to make a paste. The latter is good for cleaning toilets because it can be smeared on and left to sit before being rinsed off.

Other Eco-Friendly Products to Consider

You can do almost any standard house cleaning job around the home using the 3 products above. Adding a few drops of essential oil to your cleaning products will help them to smell nice, which should stop your house always smelling like vinegar!

Of course, there are a couple of jobs not covered: polishing furniture and doing laundry. For furniture, you can make your own polish from vinegar, water, and some kind of oil. It’s best to use a non-food oil because this can go rancid. Instead, something like walnut oil will work well.

As for laundry, your options are a bit more limited and depend on how eco-friendly you want to go. Soap nuts are an option, but you’ll need to pick them out of your washing once it’s clean! Instead, you should look for a normal laundry detergent that’s made with biodegradable ingredients.

There are, after all, some cleaning jobs you can’t really compromise on. Laundry is one example, particularly if you have kids and need some effective stain-busting action. Luckily, there are lots of eco-friendly laundry products on the market, so do some research and find one that works best for you.

The same is true for bleach, which does serve its purpose. Again, you can get eco-friendly options that don’t actually contain chlorine bleach like percarbonate of soda that does an amazing job!

DIY cleaning products are super easy to use and can end up being very cost-effective. For things like cleaning the kitchen and most of the bathroom, bicarb, white vinegar and citric acid will get pretty much everything done and you will be left knowing that your home is safe as well as clean.