one small change the second

i reported on our january challenge here
oh yes, we changed one more detergent, the dish washing, it's now an earth friendly detergent from HELD

now the second small change...


i decided to change to earth friendly cleaning products. saying this is easy, but doing it not...
as already mentioned we live in community, this really means, that our family of six lives together with 8 other adults. for our family all those small changes would have been in place already, but now having moved into a new living situation in november this has changed.
and then, there are those people in the community, who don't understand, that a cleaning product doesn't have to have a pink colour or an over powering smell of spring-flowers!
my observation, has been that especially the male population in the household love strong "clean smelling" air... and they are hard to convince that just regular smelling air ok after having cleaned a bathroom or what ever else needs to be cleaned every week.

one big earth friendly product is already in our cabinets...VINEGAR! yes, i said vinegar! I use vinegar for a lot of things around the house. a little vinegar with plain old water in a spray bottle followed by wiping dry with microfiber cleaning rags and your windows and mirrors have never looked so good.

http://vinegartips.com has wonderful uses for cleaning, disinfecting, odor remover, etc. no wonder it has been around for 10,000 years, it just might be the world's oldest and trusted ingredient.


and then there is the company called HELD, i'm going to introduce a plain "allzweckreiniger", which is just right for mostly everything.
i have to take into consideration that living in winterthur adds a bit of a challenge in regards to very hard water levels. the reason i mention this is, that showers as well as toilets have to been cleaned more often and with chalk (lime stone) removing cleaning detergents. in most cases vinegar works just fine, but some times more acidic cleaners are needed, that's why we will also be using the "badreiniger", which includes citric acid.
overall, i feel like this should be sufficient, though we will see how that change will go over with the male population in the household.
one more thing i'm excited about, i can go and refill those two cleaning products at store without buying new bottles. this will feel like a little success over the plastic consumption.