Diva Recipe: Green Granite Cleaner

Natural Stone requires extra care because it is a honed surface that and you’ll want to maintain their honed polish. To do this you want to clean with a solution that contain a neutral pH.

Requiring a neutral pH eliminates some of the more common natural cleaning ingredients, lemon at a pH of 2.4, vinegar at 2.8, & baking soda at 9.0.

I often use the PND All Purpose Cleaner on our granite counters and have yet to notice a problem, but it does contain vinegar – so not the best choice. A more delicate variety of granite may suffer over time.

Recipe

6 cups of Water
1/3 cup + 1 tsp of Alcohol denatured or regular
1 Tbs of Castille Soap – I use almond
20 Drops of Essential Oil – I use citrus or almond

If you want a stronger anti fungal or antibacterial add:
1/3 cup + 1 tsp Tea Tree Oil

This recipe will fill two spray bottles ~ I make my cleaners in batches so I don’t have to make them as often.

If you choose to add Tea Tree Oil be sure to add at least 4% as called for in the recipe, any less and you could promote bacterial resistance. Additionally omit the essential oil.  Tea tree oil has a strong eucalyptus scent that will overpower any other fragrance.

I make ours without the tea tree, the alcohol kills enough germs for my comfort level.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_tree_oil

http://www.pbase.com/weed30/cleaning_granite

http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2004/s1081381.htm

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090821043836AA7ohgN

Welcome back to PND. It's good to see you again!Diva Recipe: Green Granite Cleaner

Diva Recipe: Foaming Hand Soap

This is so easy and inexpensive – Everyone can do it!  Not only that – an average family using one bottle of foaming hand soap a week will save an average of $180 a year.

The first thing you need is an aerating dispenser bottle.

Ours came from re-using a container from another  brand.   Method makes one, and I reused a bottle from Clean Well for a year.

Vanilla Orange Foaming Hand Soap

1 1/4 cup of water
2 TBS of Castille Soap – I used the Citrus. To create your own scent use unscented.
1/4 TSP of Olive Oil
3-5 drops of Vanilla Essential Oil
4-6 drops of Citrus Essential Oil

Combine the ingredients and in a measuring cup and use a funnel to pour into the dispenser. Soap will will dispense in an nice foaming lather… and if you kids use the whole bottle in 3 days, you won’t be furious!

Diva Recipe: Foaming Hand Soap

PureNatural Home: Interior Paints Impact Indoor Air Quality

Painting your home? Consider the impact that painting your home will have on the quality of the air you breath in your home, everyday all day.

Consider the safety of the VOC’s that the paints release into your home. Do we really want to be breathing it all in? Lung Disease, Asthma and allergies are all on the rise in our country and indoor air quality is part of the problem.

Consider the following Brands:

Benjamin Moore EcoSpec

Sherwin Williams Harmony – Interior Latex

Dunn Edwards Ecoshield Interior Latex Flat – personally Dunn-Edwards is a pain in the you know what – anytime I’ve tried to buy paint, or quart size samples – they want me to come back to pick it up in 24 hours – what’s with that!

Check out these resources:
Buying Guide – Paint – The Green Guide.

Interior Paints: Which low VOC paint is best?.

PureNatural Home: Interior Paints Impact Indoor Air Quality

Skip the Paper Plates

By Tania Reuben

For your next big gathering skip buying the paper plates – instead take that money over to ikea, .99 store or look online for plain white plates (9″-10″) and buy a bunch.

One year we were throwing really a big superbowl party, for the price of the caterer’s paper quote I was able to buy 80 plates, 50 wine glasses and 48 small glasses. Now we have them every time we entertain, we use them for birthdays, bbq’s, I share them with my neighbors and a friend used them for her wedding.

I know what you’re thinking – you don’t want to wash them. Two full rows fit in my dishwasher. I really don’t feel like it’s much effort at all. Just rinse and stack them until the party is over and throw them in the machine.

They get used over and over and it’s so much nicer eating on a real plate.

Skip the Paper Plates

Avoid the Ick Factor in Bar Soap – the cleaner side of green.

By now you’ve likely heard that bar soap is the greener choice washing options – it requires less packaging, people use less, there is no container to dispose of at the end, and it’s formulated with less harsh ingredients.

Did you know that liquid soap bottles account for over 2 millions pounds of plastic in our landfills annually and this product didn’t even exist until the 1980′s!

A small amount of bacteria can live on the soap and there’s the icky mess – so I don’t know about you – but this has stopped me from embracing the bar. Now, I have the answer!

Take your lovely bar of soap and a potato peeler, to create individual sized pieces of soap and set them in a lovely dish.  Be sure to take your individual sized piece before wetting your hands.

You can enjoy the benefits of the bar without the gooey mess. You’ll also likely to wash longer as you wait scrub using your own little soap strip.

If you can’t break away from the liquid – find a green brand and buy the gallon size to refill your small containers. I’ve sometimes found the gallon sized method at Costco and Pangea Organics also makes a large bottle but you’ll need to order it.

So make the switch – save some money and be kinder to the environment.

 

Avoid the Ick Factor in Bar Soap – the cleaner side of green.