This Is Not My Beautiful House

The county where I live has a website that has posted free recipes for non-toxic household cleaners. To find out how to make your own high quality cleaning supplies, navigate to the Chittenden Solid Waste District's page entitled, Non-Toxic Household Cleaners Recipes for a Safer Home and a Cleaner Environment.

Most of the recipes on the site come from Clean House, Clean Planet by Karen Logan

Other books you might like on the topic include:

Clean and Green , by Annie Berthold-Bond. New York: Ceres Press, 1990. and
Home Safe Home ,by Debra Lynn Dadd.

There are many places online to find quick recipes for your own home cleaning products. For some easy ones and a good overview on how to make your own Non-Toxic Cleaning Kit go to the article by Annie B. Bond posted on the Healthy and Green Living Blog (http://www.care2.com/greenliving/make-your-own-non-toxic-cleaning-kit.html) Annie describes several concoctions that are made from only five basic ingredients:

Baking soda
Washing soda
White distilled vinegar
A good liquid soap or detergent
Tea tree oil
6 clean spray bottles
2 glass jars

You can also get a brief description of each of these supplies in the article.

My favorite is the one for mold (eww!) she calls Tea Tree Treasure. You only need:

2 teaspoons tea tree oil
2 cups water

Combine in a spray bottle, shake to blend, and spray on problem areas. Do not rinse. Makes two cups.

Annie says: "Tea tree oil is expensive, but a little goes a very long way. Note that the smell of tea tree oil is very strong, but it will dissipate in a few days. "

There is a link at the bottom of that article for over 100 more articles related to non-toxic cleaning. You might also want to read comments of other readers who post their own suggestions too!

The Secret Life Of Cell Phones

The other day I was reading an article in the magazine "Inc." entitled, "Cool Campus Start-ups" about a Missouri student who calls himself Green Mobile Man and has started an innovative new company, which buys, sells, trades and repairs used mobile phones. You can read the article entitled, A New Life For Old Phones, on Inc.'s website.

It reminded me that it was time again to pay attention to gathering all those discarded cell phones we seem to be unable to do without for a few years and then eventually throw into a drawer somewhere at home. This seems to happen regularly when the next better, more technologically improved, sleeker and 'sweeter' phone/web-email/music player/pda combination comes out, preferably when our phone contract is up.

Many of us remember hearing how toxic these products are when we discard them in the trash and that their elements leach into the earth eventually. I thought I would post this video produced by the Inform Project that reviews the statistics on this and the ways to recycle them here:



This is from Inform's Secret Life Series and the website at http://www.secret-life.org/cellphones/ is very informative with instructions on exactly how to recycle your cell phones and spread the word about doing so.