Are Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products Any Good?
We’ve all been told we should make the switch to more eco-friendly cleaning products but which ones? And are they any good? We have the low-down on the best on the market.
We’ve all been there: you want to choose a greener cleaning product, but, quite frankly, the cleaning products you have are doing the job and you’ve got better things to do with your day than go through the hassle of finding an eco-friendly alternative. One day you do take the time to look at a couple of greener products in the supermarket and they’re more expensive than the ones you have in your cupboard and you think to yourself: what’s the point? Do they actually work?
Is it even worth it?
We’re here to reassure you on the efficacy front. If you’re not into grabbing a pot of bicarbonate of soda, some vinegar and a lemon to do some eco-cleaning, modern eco-friendly cleaning products are now made to work - and are picking up awards for doing so.
One of our favourites, Bower Collective’s* washing up liquid just won the Good Housekeeping Award for best washing up liquid against all the major competitors. Move over Fairy. And SMOL*, one of the UK’s favourite eco-cleaning brands, has 15,000 5-star reviews. Take that Flash.
Eco-brands may be just as good, or better than their non-eco competitors, but they’re still more expensive, we hear you cry.
Well, yes - and no. Eco-brands tend to be more expensive because of the research needed to change their chemical make-up to become less polluting. Many cleaning brands are shifting from synthetic chemicals, that are harming our waterways, to non-synthetic chemicals that are not - and it takes time and money to make sure they actually work.
The good news is that it’s becoming easier to choose eco-friendly cleaning products because their cost is dropping - and ingenious brands like ecoegg are finding ways of making them significantly cheaper than their non-eco counterparts. Ecoegg’s washing ball costs £9.99 and is guaranteed for 10 years, potentially replacing around 50 bottles of laundry liquid. Weirdly, it uses mineral pellets to wash your clothes - and, more weirdly still, it works.
Green Salon’s favourite green cleaning products:
Here are the brands that Green Salon has mystery shopped for quality, and found to be as good or better than their non-eco equivalents, and also vetted for their sustainability credentials. Some are more expensive than their non-eco competitors - some significantly less so.
EcoEgg’s replace plastic bottles of laundry liquid for much less cost.
ecoegg:
Ecoegg is a no brainer from a money-saving point of view. By our calculations, their £9.99 laundry egg could save a family of 4 over £200 over it’s 10 year life time and save you from throwing away around 50 plastic bottles. But how does it work?
The ecoegg is a plastic egg that is filled with mineral pellets. The biodegradable surfactants in the minerals lift dirt from the fabric, break it up and and wash it away thanks to their positive and negative charge. Think GCSE chemistry.
Luckily, we don’t need to worry too much about the science here as the proof is in the result: clean laundry at a lower cost.
The cost is £9.99 for an ecoegg that is guaranteed for 10 years, and £4.99 for a bag of mineral pellets that need topping up every 4-6 months.
Delphis Eco is a favourite with Green Salon for the sheer number of great ways they score 100%.
They’re 100% derived from plant-based renewable resources, 100% biodegradable in the environment, 100% not tested on animals, 100% recycled plastic bottles with biodegradable labels, 100% recyclable and 100% made in the UK.
What’s more they are the professional cleaners cleaning product of choice, used in commercial cleaning settings, including London Zoo. They also have two Royal Warrants from the Queen and the Prince of Wales.
Not bad for a cleaning company!
Delphis Eco limescale remover (700ml) costs £4.00 which is more expensive than Harpic at £2.99. However, you can buy Delphis Eco in 5 litre bottles that end up working out only fractionally more expensive than non-eco competitors.
Bower Collective’s refillable cleaning products just look so gorgeous!
Another favourite with Green Salon is Bower Collective who are on a mission to reduce plastic waste. If you sign up to their subscription service, they’ll send you pouches of eco-friendly cleaning products that you can pour into your own bottles - or their trade mark Bower bottles. Then, you send the pouches back to be recycled by them, or very soon, simply to be refilled and returned.
We especially love that they took the Bowerbird - famous for recycling brightly coloured plastic scraps to decorate its nest, or bower - as their inspiration.
Their award-winning washing up liquid costs £3.99 for 1 litre making it twice the price of Fairy.
SMOL*:
Did you know that more than 90% of a typical bottle of cleaning product is water? Which means that every time we transport cleaning products from the factory to under our kitchen sinks, we're effectively lugging around millions of litres of water which is expensive and carbon intensive.
SMOL’s solution? It’s concentrated all its house cleaning products into tiny tablets, that you can pop into your bottle-for-life, add water and away you go. At Green Salon, we love the fact that their plastic-free boxes of cleaning tablets land on the door mat as if by magic when we need them - in the process preventing the creation of 657 tonnes of plastic, not just for our houses we hasten to add.
SMOL’s only downside, it still uses synthetic chemicals in its products: albeit it at a significantly reduced level to non-eco competitors.
It’s dishwasher tablet just won BBC Good Food Best Dishwasher Tablet 2021. At £4.60 (15p per wash) for 30 dishwasher tablets, they’re around 5-8p cheaper per capsule than most full-price branded items - and 13p cheaper than Finish Quantum dishwashing tablets.
As ever on your sustainability journey, start small and take pride in any steps you take. You only need to change small things to make a big difference.
We analyse each brand for their commitment to sustainability but we are not a certification body, nor are we auditors, and we have taken the approach that we trust brands to tell the truth about their sustainability policies, practices and plans.
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