Did you know that bathroom cleaners are some of the most toxic cleaning products on the market? They’re so harsh to kill organisms – yet when used in bathrooms that typically have poor ventilation, the fumes can be quite overpowering.
Let’s take a quick look at Soft Scrub Total – it foams, sprays, and can work upside down. Yet it received a C in the Environmental Working Group’s Guide to Healthy Cleaning.
Soft Scrub Total includes fragrance that irritates skin and allergies, and sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate, a chemical that’s toxic to aquatic life.
Safer choices
For safer, homemade options, you can clean your bathroom with white vinegar or hydrogen peroxide. (Hydrogen peroxide is a great, safe alternative to bleach.) You can also make your own scrubbing paste out of baking soda and lemon juice.
What I use in my home
For several years, I used liquid castile soap to clean my bathroom – just a squirt of it swished and scrubbed in my toilet bowl. I also clean countertops and toilet seats with hydrogen peroxide. And I used Shaklee scrubs and sprays in my bathtub.
However, once I started cleaning with Norwex products this summer, I simply clean my entire bathroom with water and a Norwex microfiber towel. (Disclosure: I love Norwex products so much that I became an independent sales consultant. Sales made through my website result in a commission for me.)
So here’s my simplified bathroom cleaning routine. When I’m done in the shower, I wipe down the shower walls with an EnviroCloth. There’s no need to moisten since the shower’s already wet. Sometimes – if it’s been a while between cleanings – I use Norwex’s Scrubby Corner Cloth to get soap scum off. And once in a blue moon I use Norxex’s Cleaning Paste to quickly scour any hard-to-remove build-up.
Once my shower’s clean, I move on to my sink and countertop. Again, it’s just a quick swipe – and sometimes a little bit more thorough scrub – with an EnviroCloth. I polish my mirror with Norwex’s Window Cloth.
I touch up any spots on my floor with my moist EnviroCloth – since I have young children, I try to get the area around the toilet. Then, I rinse the EnviroCloth out with tap water and wipe down the outside of my toilet. I move on to the toilet seat and finally, as long as the toilet has been flushed first, I wipe down the inside of my toilet bowl.
Instead of getting totally grossed out, I trust that Norwex’s naturally antibacterial and antimicrobial silver is cleansing the cloth right away. I then throw the EnviroCloth with my dirty load of laundry, wash and dry it. Voila!
(Just so you don’t think I’m bonkers for cleaning my toilet with an EnviroCloth, you have to check out the results of an independent lab study on the EnviroCloth … it should make you think twice about using antibacterial cleaners when compared to Norwex!)
How do you clean your bathroom without any chemicals?
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I am very pleased with my Norwex cleaning cloths!
Hi! I found your blog through Whole New Mom. Thanks for your post. I clicked over because I was curious about what you said about Borax killing mold. How does that work? I actually have some mold in the bathroom I need to take care of. Do you just scrub it on like a cleaner? and how would you use a Norwex product to kill mold? Thanks for your help!
Thanks for visiting Accidentally Green today, Kristine!
You can treat mold by wiping it clean with a ratio of 1 cup of Borax dissolved in 1 gallon of water. And if I was using Norwex to get rid of mold, I would try to wipe and scrub it off with an EnviroCloth, then launder the EnviroCloth. Hope this helps in your bathroom!
Thank you!!
A note for those with hard water… We have REALLY hard water. My bathtub was NASTY. I’d actually kinda given up on cleaning it because it just looked terrible, even after scrubbing it. So why bother scrubbing, right? My Norwex bathroom cleaner (Blue Diamond), scrub cloths, etc. didn’t make a dent. But when I used the *descaler*, there was an *instant* difference. Apparently, the general grime was sort of “embedded” in the hard water deposits so I couldn’t scrub either one off.
So if you have hard water – or think you might – and the tub/fixtures aren’t coming clean, try the descaler and see if it helps.
You say that the Norwex cloth’s silver is “cleansing the cloth right away” and refer to a study in the supplied link. However, in that study they stated that the cloth does indeed remove the bacteria from surfaces, but they did not test whether the bacteria was “killed” or “destroyed” on the cloth. You would still have to make sure that you were laundering the cloth in a way that eliminated the bacteria that you removed. The study also said that a generic microfiber cloth worked almost as well as the Norwex cloth, compared to paper towel and cleaner.
The Norwex silver does not “kill” bacteria but it does provide an environment where bacteria cannot grow (basically it suffocates them). I always rinse my cloths well and then air dry them for 24 hours before I launder them because that is how long it takes for the bacteria in the cloth to die. This is what makes our cloths different… the other cloth removed 84% and Norwex 92%. Then, the bacteria dies in the cloth. AND… Norwex cloths are guaranteed to work as good as the day you bought them for two full years. You wont get that out of the “other” microfiber cloths. AND… most people who have used the cloths say that used under normal household circumstances, the Norwex cloths will last 5 years+. Hope that helps!
I love my Norwex, I really do, but although I can find studies that show the surface is being cleaned, I’m having a much harder time finding anything showing the actual cloth is clean. Am I wiping up the germs on my counter, table and floor and then spreading those germs on my kids’ faces? Do the Norwex cloths really come out of the wash germ-free? I found this bio-chemist turned stay-at-home-mom’s personal experiment shows my Norwex cloth is probably really germy! http://www.stopthestomachflu.com/norwex-cloth-independent-testing
OMG that same scientist updated her experiment just yesterday (after I read it) and she found a Norwex Envirocloth transfers very few germs. Hooray! She was unable to find a way to kill germs in the laundry without bleach, so you might consider boiling your cloth for 10 minutes after using it for really germy cleaning.