Benjamin Mott - 201 Everyday Uses for Salt, Lemons, Vinegar, and Baking Soda: Natural, Affordable, and Sustainable Solutions for the Home

Grab any one of the bottles of household cleansers under your sink or in your laundry closet and check out the ingredientsyou will be confronted by a Pandoras box of exotic compounds that only a chemical engineer could understand, much less pronounce. Now have a look at the dire words of caution printed on those bottles. Even if you arent familiar with the chemicals on the ingredients list, are you sure you want something that comes with that kind of warning spread around your home, where you and your loved ones spend most of your sleeping and waking hours?

Of course not! And an excellent way to start detoxing your home is to avoid the commercially made household products that have become more and more common since the early days of the twentieth century. This book provides you with hundreds of simple, natural alternatives to many of the manufactured products we routinely reach for on grocery shelves every time we shop. Not only do these alternatives work just as well as their laboratory-made cousins, they are almost always less expensive.

And much less toxic.

Chances are you decided to pick up this book because you are concerned about the environment and curious about what effect daily human activityincluding your ownmight have on our planet. Above all, you are holding this book in your hands because you want to do whatever you can to make your home as safe as possible for you and your loved ones. You might also wonder how we as a culture arrived at this position, where products that might not be good for our health are heavily marketed and widely available.

Humankinds ingenuity has led to all sorts of advances that benefit us as individuals and as a society. Leaving aside the troubling question of the unequal global distribution of certain essential resources, the overall abundance of food and material comforts available to us today provides many millions of people around the globe with a lifestyle that would have been inconceivable just one hundred years ago. Unfortunately all that progress has produced side effects for which we were unprepared. Today we are still trying to figure out many of the long-term repercussions.

It was in the nineteenth century that factories began to mass-produce the materials that have made life so much more comfortable and convenient. Unfortunately this also led to the largely indiscriminate dumping of airborne and waterborne waste productsmany of them poisonous and long-lastingthat have literally changed the face of the planet. That trend has only accelerated in the decades since then.

In the twentieth century, advances in chemical engineering led to the manufacture of countless exotic compounds that promised (and in many cases, delivered) great benefits. Some were pharmaceuticals that amplified our ability to combat disease. Some were materials-based (one of which yielded one of the single most useful and simultaneously most harmful human inventions: plastic). Some compounds were created for industrial or agricultural applications (like the pesticide DDT). And many others were designed to make life at home easier, whether in preparing and storing food or in cleaning. (By the way, if you have questions about the effects on your health of any chemicals listed as ingredients in your home cleaning or cosmetic products, you can learn more at the Environmental Working Groups excellent website, EWG.org.)

The ecological consequences of global industrialization are still playing out in the broader environmenttheyre what Superfund sites are made of, after allso it should come as no surprise that all those waste products have tangible effects in the home too. Did you know, for instance, that before the Industrial Revolution, sterling silver did not tarnish? The dependence on sulfuric acid for many manufacturing processes, but especially in making dyed cloth, introduced large quantities of hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide into the air. And these are two of the chemicals that combine with silver to give it that dull gray-yellow tinge (silver sulfide).

If you learned from your parents or grandparents to make sure your silverware was well covered when storing it, it was to keep these sulfuric compounds from coming into contact with the metal. Alas, such precautions only go so far. As a result it is often necessary to polish silver to wipe away the tarnish before using it. There are three main products commercially available for this purpose: propylene glycol (a viscous ingredient found in many products, including liquid fog and e-cigarettes); sodium carbonate, a white crystalline salt used to make paper, glass, and soap, among other things; and an aluminum silicate-based cream polish.