The green way to clean

Ever see that guy Graham Haley on public TV? He's the clean freak who knows a million clever ways to clean everything in your home without investing in expensive cleaning products. He relies heavily on baking soda, vinegar, and ammonia to do just about every cleaning job.

I enjoy watching him almost as much as I enjoy Britain's Queens of Clean, Kim and Aggie, who appear on the BBC's "How Clean Is Your House?" They use similarly simple products and techniques to rescue England's biggest slobs from their squalor. The bottom-line message from all these hints: It's far cheaper to concoct your own cleaning supplies than to buy all that multi-colored stuff on the supermarket shelf.

Which brings me to an excellent article at Grist, in which Sarah Van Schagen tests a variety of non-toxic and green cleaning products to see how well they work. Running her experiments in a bathroom shared by six people, she found that baking soda or borax will do just as well as any other type of scrub, be it "eco-friendly" or not. Scroll through her experiences to see what she found.

Van Schagen also points to a Consumer Reports page that has dozens of easy and non-toxic ways to clean every surface in your home. As for me, I'm heading out to buy a box of borax.

Don Willmott's blog posts are provided by LifeWire, a part of The New York Times Company.