A Greener Clean

Mark's old roommate would give us cleaning products for free all the time (he got them from a family member who worked for whoever makes Scrubbing Bubbles. I have lots of Scrubbing Bubbles.) So now I have a ridiculous amount of cleaning products, some of which are similar but not quite the same. Fun Fact: Did you know there are four a billion different kinds of scrubbing bubbles? I have four. I'm not about to get rid of something that was free, but there are so many that they have nowhere to go. Add to that our recent recycling resolution* and we were in serious need of some space. So on Saturday, I took everything out of the cabinets under both sinks and from under, around, etc, my clawfoot tub. You could see these, they weren't really hiding. Pretty tacky. 

I didn't end up getting rid of anything, but I was able to put things that were duplicates (or close cousins...looking at you, 4 kinds of scrubbing bubbles) way in the back so that other things were able to hide. Now I just need to use that stuff up for good. (I wrote this Sunday and today we finished off a bottle of Clorox Clean Up--yay!)

The next step is figuring out what I want to use/make for green products. I've seen a couple of good articles on this like this one and this other one on Young House Love, as well as the resources here. Those are all good places to start, and I'm going to use them as I finish off the rest of my non-green cleaners and am ready to go greener. And part of the reason I want to start thinking about this now is because I may want to save some of those bottles--it's much greener to reuse them than go out and buy new ones. 

*I have a blue metal bin that lives next to the chair in the dining room for recycling. Because I only drink milk, I mostly have paper to recycle and it fits nicely. Mark does not exclusively drink milk and recycles cans and bottles. These drive me nuts. Also, its not very logical to have the recycling in the dining room if its kitchen-y stuff (in my defense, most of MY recycling is paper, so it made sense in the past). Plus we had this big red bucket hanging out with the army of cleaning supplies--not cute. So we put a bag in the bucket and put it under the sink for (ta-da!) recycleables. I feel better already.