Home & Garden

Hippyshopper guide to your eco spring clean

There's a long weekend coming up, so you'll have no more excuses not to do those chores: It's time to dust away the cobwebs and get to work on your house, flat, yurt or caravan for your big 2008 spring clean! To help you make this your greenest spring clean yet, we've rounded up some of the best eco-friendly cleaning products and asked consumers what they thought of them.

Follow the jump for our roundup of green cleaning products...

Ecover
Definitely the main 'household name' in eco-friendly cleaning products; you can buy Ecover in almost any supermarket now. As a big fan of many of their products myself (I swear by the bio laundry detergent and adore the gentle citrussy smell of handwash lotion) it doesn't surprise me that most people give Ecover the thumbs up. The washing-up liquid is an all-time favourite with our readers, with the only complaint being that it makes some people's hands feel a bit dry. Many supermarkets now do their own brand equivalents of Ecover (Morrisons' 'Natural', Tesco 'Naturals' and so on) which do the many of the same jobs slightly cheaper.

Bio
Bio is an alternative to Ecover that is becoming more widespread, but you'll mostly find it in more 'hippy' shops than your local supermarket. You can also buy it online at places like Natural Collection. It's good value stuff, which you can buy in bulk, and gets the thumbs up from our Editorial Director Katie Lee, who was recently singing the praises of their loo cleaner! Ecover wins hands down on the washing powder though, as we're told that Bio's powder has a tendency to 'clump'.

Baileys
Baileys is the absolute best place to go for 'tools of the trade' when it comes to cleaning out your abode. They've got all kinds of wonderful dusters, brushes, mops and more, all in old-fashioned styles and made using very sustainable methods (many are recycled). What comes as the biggest surprise of all is how reasonably priced the items are: have a look at the eco household section to see for yourself. You can also find eco-friendly cleaning products here, all of which come in pretty bottles that'll look good in your kitchen. The washing up liquid (£2) is a particularly good buy.

Method
Method is a relative new kid on the block, but has heaps of products in yummy scents to get your home shining again. As well as the basic cleaning products you'd expect, Method has quite a few specialist lines, including a stainless steel cleaner, biodegradable wipes for leather and an almond-fragranced wood polish. Hippyshopper readers rated Method Pink Grapefruit spray cleaner very highly; it's an all-purpose cleaner that absorbs dirt rather than chemically degrading it. One interesting claim that Method makes is that there's no need to rinse the products off surfaces with as much gusto as you would for more chemically-laden alternatives.

Lemons
If you want to go down the real earth-mother route, then lemons will probably constitute a large part of your eco-friendly cleaning ritual. There are lots of things you can do with them, from freshening up your dishwasher to cleaning kitchen surfaces, as we learned here. You might also want to add some bicarbonate of soda into the mix for a powerful yet totally eco friendly clean.

Mops
You could simply raid the Baileys catalogue for some old-school cleaning equipment, but if you prefer something a bit whizzier, you're looking ad mops made from a lot of plastic that need regular refills, which aren't very green. The good news is it's fairly easy to make your own ones, and there are some handy instructions on making your own duster refills here.

Related: Clean your home naturally with Maison Belle

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