Non-Toxic Cleaning for the Home

...bleach as a disinfectant: For food preparation surfaces, ordinary bathroom cleaning, cleaning children’s toys and changing tables: Mix 1T of chlorine bleach in a gallon of warm water. Wipe down surfaces with this solution and air dry. For the most extreme cleaning scenarios, such as cleaning up diarrhea or vomit produced by ill people in sick room situations, a stronger solution of ⅓ cup bleach to 1 gallon of water can be used It is dangerous and...

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On the Safety of Cleaning Products

...ut come with significant risks to ourselves and to our environment. How do cleaning products clean? Most cleaning products consist of detergents that lower the surface tension of water and/or acids or bases that dissolve calcium and fatty substances. Some acids act as disinfectants and bases also inhibit the corrosion of metal. Solvents (such as alcohol) also dissolve fatty substances. Other chemicals are added to cleaning products such as water s...

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Swedish Death Cleaning

...e day you kick the bucket. The ultimate purpose of death cleaning is to minimize the amount of stuff, especially meaningless clutter, that you leave behind for others to deal with. The article goes on to describe Margareta Magnusson, the doyen of Swedish death cleaning, as Marie Kondo with a dose of momento mori. Not having read Magnusson’s book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, I can’t comment on the method’s effectiveness, but its clear...

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Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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011 Cleaning, Long Crowing Roosters and Water Storage

...ng roosters and we answer a reader question about emergency water storage. Cleaning Apartment Therapy post on cleaning: How to Clean Your House on 20 minutes a Day for 30 Days. Erik references the importance of processing your inbox, an idea learned from a book Getting Things Done by David Allen. Long Crowing Roosters The Wikipedia article on long crowing roosters. A youtube playlist of long crowing roosters. Musical break “Banty Rooster Blues” by...

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