Less Waste With Green Cleaning

The environmental impact of ever-growing landfills is a concern to governments and people the world over. Researchers at Yale University looked at over 1,200 landfills and estimated that Americans alone had 294 million tons of waste sent to landfills in 2013. This represented an increase over the previous year. This comes out to about 5 pounds of garbage per person in the United States for that year. 

Reducing Your Landfill Impact 

Attempting to reduce the amount of waste we produce as a society is, of course, the main push behind recycling. Beyond individual action, most states and localities now provide residents with recycling bins to go next to your trash bin when putting out the trash. As valuable as this is, there's more you can be doing to reduce what's going into that trash can each week. 

If you're seeking new ways to reduce your personal contribution to the nation's landfills, you may want to look at how you clean your home. Many of us buy an array of cleaning products for our homes without thinking about what happens to the chemicals in them as they go down the drain or how all their bottles add to the landfill problem. 

Home-Made Cleaners 

Instead of buying a separate bottle of dish-washing liquid, laundry soap, drain cleaner and all-purpose cleaner, you may want to utilize natural products that you already have around the house. This reduction in the number of products you have to buy not only means fewer containers to throw away but also fewer cleaners with toxic ingredients that make their way into the groundwater. 

You can create an array of cleaners just by mixing varying combinations of liquid castile soap, baking soda, citric acid, salt, white wine vinegar and essential oils. Not only are these far friendlier for anything that gets impacted by them going down your drain but the baking soda and citric acid can often be bought in cardboard containers. 

You can make laundry detergent with a mixture of liquid castile soap, baking soda and coarse salt with added water. A mixture of vinegar and any preferred essential oil can make a good fabric softener, that won't make your clothes smell like vinegar. Combining baking soda and vinegar and pouring it down your drain and leaving it be for about 15 minutes will make an effective drain cleaner when followed by hot water. 

More Convenient Natural Cleaning 

If you'd prefer more of a ready-made green cleaning solution to the harsh chemical household cleaners on the market, you do have options available to you. CleanPacs is one company with eco-friendly products that will cut down your impact on landfills while giving you powerful, effective cleaning products that are pet and child-friendly. 

You basically order an initial kit that includes three reusable plastic bottles as well as three sets of three packets of cleaning products that are shipped right to your door. These include a bathroom cleaner, kitchen cleaner and a glass cleaner. You simply pour each packet in its bottle, mix with water, shake and then start cleaning as you normally would without missing any of those harsh chemicals in your old products. When you run low and need more cleaner, they simply send you more packets. You can even sign up for regular shipments at an interval of your choosing for more CleanPacs. You get convenience while also saving 70 percent off many leading brands at the store. 

Final Thoughts 

Whether you choose to do it yourself by mixing and matching natural products throughout the house or buying ready-made products such as the CleanPacs, you can reduce your contribution to landfills. You can become an inspiration to your friends, family and neighbors and encourage them to take similar action.