But toxins do not only live in the bleach you use to scrub your bathroom or the industrial products you use when power-cleaning your carpet. When thinking about green cleaning and green living, we often forget our laundry!
Depending on how many people live in your household, doing laundry is one of the most frequent household chores we all need to do. Another crucial factor many people overlook is how close we come into contact with toxins in our laundry. Clothes literally touch and cover our skin, and it may be very well to exclusively buy and wear 100% cotton – but what about all the chemicals that you use to wash your clothes and that subsequently live on our body?
The skin is our largest organ and can suffer a vast array of allergies, many of them related to the clothes we wear, including the chemicals that live in the clothes we wear. If you have sensitive skin, are prone to allergies, or have a newborn or small child, you might consider doing your laundry the green way!
In today’s world, this should not be a daunting task. There exist countless green, natural, or non-toxic alternatives to laundry detergent, fabric softeners and even bleach. A search for liquid laundry detergent on amazon.com alone yields over 150 product results.
In our experience, one of the main reasons why many people have not made the switch to green cleaning or laundry products yet, is that many believe these products won’t work well. But nothing could be further from the truth. We have done a lot of research and tried and tested many green products over the years, and find that today’s green cleaning products work extremely well – sometimes even better than the harsh chemicals in conventional cleaning products.
The Environmental Working Group recently evaluated nearly 300 general purpose laundry detergents and of these, only a handful are non-toxic. This article compares the 7 best options for doing your laundry in a green way. Try it, your skin will thank you for it.