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10 Quick Tips to Green Cleaning

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It's easy to find natural ways to clean your home. Here's my quick Top 10 list:

  1. Use cleaning products made from safe natural and nontoxic ingredients to prevent exposure to the hazardous synthetic chemicals conventional cleaners often contain.

  2. Dust with a damp cloth to ensure that household dust, which can collect toxins, is removed from surfaces and not stirred back into the air.

  3. Open windows and doors occasionally, even in winter, to rinse out any air pollutants that have accumulated inside.

  4. Spray carefully. Propellant-powered aerosol spray products release ingredients in the form of easily breathable microscopic droplets that stay suspended in the air for hours after use. Better bets are hand-powered spray products or those applied with a sponge or rag.

  5. Try to avoid using commercial pesticide products in your home, yard or garden, or on your pets. Instead, supplement a preventative strategy with natural pest-control methods.

  6. Use baking soda. Freshen everything from carpets and cat boxes to trash cans and drains with nontoxic baking soda. Just sprinkle, let stand overnight and vacuum or rinse odors away the next day.

  7. Warm water can be best. Synthetic chemicals and other pollutants often accumulate unseen on the surfaces you are cleaning. Since hot water easily turns many of these substances into vapors that can be inhaled, clean with warm or tepid water instead.

  8. Use chlorine-free dishwasher detergent. The chlorine in conventional detergents is easily vaporized by hot dishwasher water and then released into the air.

  9. Ask guests to remove their shoes when entering your home. That way, they won't track in pollutants.

  10. Buy a vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter. These special filters trap unhealthy dust particles.

Get more information at www.seventhgeneration.com.

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