I recently bought the book Better Basics for the Home: Simple Solutions for Less Toxic Living by Annie Berthold, which comes highly recommended by many. I bought it so I could start making more of my own home cleaning supplies and stop buying commercial cleaning supplies packaged in plastic. The major impetus for the purchase is that I am running out of the Mrs. Meyer's all purpose cleaner, which I bought about six months ago for moping the floors and cleaning my car. The Better Basic's book is chalked full of great cleaning recipes(!), but I was a little saddened by this one:
Basic Floor Cleaner Formula
1/4 cup liquid soap or detergent
Up to 1/2 cup white distilled vinegar or lemon juice
2 gallons warm water
It calls for liquid soap...which I have only be able to buy in plastic. I wish I knew of a co-op where I could refill my preexisting containers with bulk liquid soap, but I have not found on. This is LA there must be a co-op that carries liquid soaps, shampoo/conditioner somewhere, but where? I'm thinking I could use power soap (i.e. laundry or dishwasher) instead of liquid soap, I guess it is worth a try. Any other thoughts/suggestions?
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You could always flake bar soaps and mix with water to get a sudsy solution, but it's more work and possibly more expensive.
For floors, I don't think you'd really need the suds, unless you had some particularly greasy spot. In those cases you can always spot clean with baking soda and vinegar (the reaction get the grime)
There are a lot of recipes on the web for making bar soap into liquid soap. You're basically grating the bar soap and melting it into hot water.
http://www.casasugar.com/1734577
http://tipnut.com/homemade-liquid-soap/
For more cleaning power, you can use a laundry bar soap like zote instead of a body bar and add borax or washing soda. This combination is usually found in recipes for homemade laundry detergent.
Awesome thanx for the suggestions!
hi there. i just found your blog because i am on a similar adventure. i live in l.a. too (silverlake). i recently went to naturemart on hillhurst. unfortunately they only have plastic bags for their bulk stuff and sometimes it's even more expensive than the regular packaged stuff. anyway, they DO have large bottles of shampoo, olive oil, and dish soap that you can bring in a container to fill.
We just recently bought a steam mop. Yes it is made out of plastic, but it just uses water! No chemicals!!
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