Another of Alice‘s “Reduce This” questions is about cleaning products:

How to reduce the amount of cleaning fluids I use, especially the ones which damage the environment the most? See my blog for an idea for free limescale remover…

Whenever I talk to anyone about this sort of thing, I always make a joke about how we’re being green (as opposed to just lazy) when we don’t keep our house all shiny and polished but there is some truth in it – a lot of people use a lot of chemicals to keep their house a lot “cleaner” than it really needs to be. (I’ve put cleaner in inverted commas because filling your house with harsh chemicals isn’t really health-clean either.)

My friend Katherine swears by E-Cloths and we use a lot of vinegar, soda crystals and borax here.

What do you use? Got any techniques to help cut down the amount of stuff you do use?

As I’ve said before, we’re not cleaning obsessives in this house but when we do clean, we’re the cleaning hardcore.

Cleaning sessions usually start with the hunt for a scrubbing brush, then follow with the application of gallons of elbow grease (we bulk-buy, it’s cheaper), then end with an exclamation of “oh! I forgot it was that colour!”

We’ve got a couple of scrubbing brushes lurking under sinks at the moment, all with the bristles somewhat bent out, tired from all the exertion. They’re still quite clean though (since we tended to use a lot of water and soap with the elbow grease) so it seems a shame to through them out but their effectiveness as scrubbing brush seems to have lessened somewhat.

Any suggestions about what we can do with them instead? Or how to bring them back to life?

(Photo by sparkules)

Since there was such a positive response to Em’s sponge scourer query, I’ll post about something I’d also worried about the gackness level: mop heads.

We’re not ardent moppers but have to change the mop heads themselves quite a lot because the coarse and often dirty nature of our floors means that after a couple of uses, they look really quite sad and/or not the type of thing you want to use when ‘cleaning’. We swap and change between using cloth mops, string mops and those new-fangled-super-dooper-cost-£3-a-time mopheads but none of them seem to be particularly hard wearing.

Any suggestions on what we can do when with them once they’ve been relegated from their rightful role?

Another suggestion from Em:

Thanks for the light bulb ideas – really great.

Cheers, Em

We use them until they’re dead too and I worry about reusing them if they’re food gacky – but any suggestions anyway, particularly if the gack level is low?

(Oh, and I’ve also had an email from a chap called Antony who wants to find a company that makes cardboard boxes from recycled cardboard – if anyone has any ideas, leave a comment below or email me and I’ll forward along the message)