4 Ways To Start Cleaning Green

The sun is shining and the days are getting long and warm! I love this time of year and have been finding myself craving slow spring days - days where I can just putter around and clean and organize.

I've posted before about how you can start reducing the toxic load in your home. It's fairly simple - once we understand what is harmful and what's not, we can then make choices to keep our toxic load as light as possible. It's hard to do better unless we know better! By being aware of and actively reducing our exposure to toxins can drastically impact our health and wellbeing. Check out the 5 Ways to Reduce Toxic Load in Your Home for tips on how to start.

Making this switch to reducing the chemicals and toxins in your life doesn't happen overnight, but with some easy ditching and switching, we can start cleaning it up. You can slowly, over time, remove anything nasty from your home and your life. Not only does this save you money, but it gives you peace of mind knowing that you are keeping all the chemicals and toxins away! It's important for your health, for your family's health, the safety of your pets and kids, and the environment... not to mention the future of our environment!

Okay, time to take action!

Assemble the culprits

Pick a room in your house (kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc.) and gather all of your products. For example, let's start in the kitchen. Grab your cleaning supplies and put them in a box or on the counter - somewhere you can easily sort through them. With some of your products, it will be obvious which ones are loaded with chemicals. Others may be a little trickier. Use the ThinkDirty app or EWG Verified to see where your products fall on the rating scale.

Ditch 'em.

Let's start small and just ditch and switch one product at a time. The easiest way is to take a look at your products and when they either expire or run out, swap the non-eco-friendly ones with eco-friendly options. Easy peasy, and it won't leave you feeling overwhelmed!

However, if you have a product that you use often (say, an all-purpose cleaner that you reach for multiple times a day) or something that rates really high on the ThinkDirty scale, let's just be proactive and get rid of that one right away.

But do it safely!

Whatever you choose to ditch needs to be disposed of safely. After all, you're not doing the environment any good if you just chuck it in the garbage! This guide will help you determine the safest way to dispose of your products.

To buy or DIY... that is the question.

After you've gathered your products, determined which ones need to go, and have safely disposed of all the bad seeds, you have a choice to make - BUY or DIY. Now, making your own natural products can be fun (psst... subscribe to our newsletter to receive a TON of easy DIY ideas!) but it does take a bit of time to find the recipes, get the ingredients, and so on. If you aren't the DIY type, check out these great resources for some awesome and SAFE products.

dōTERRA On Guard Products

ThinkDirty's List of Verified Brands

EWG's Guide to Healthy Cleaning

One more thing!

This is going to come as no surprise, but essential oils are THE BOMB when it comes to green cleaning. They smell great, they're all-natural and plant-based, and antibacterial. Below is a list of 10 amazing essential oils for green cleaning via Hellonest.co

So there you have it! I have an amazing resource to help you get started ditching and switching the chemicals and toxins in your life, one day at a time.

Click the image below to snag your FREE Ditch & Switch: A Guide to Detoxifying Your Life!