If you want to clean green...
 Feb 26th, 2004
Advantages:
value for money, green
Disadvantages:
none
Recommendable:
Yes
  Bryn_Pearson
About me:
If you go to http://www.extasybooks.com/eb. php3?ebookid=18853 you can have a look at my latest wor...
Member since:21.05.2001
Reviews:417
Members who trust:49
Review rated by 35 Ciao members on average: very helpful 
This review received a counterstatement by a party concerned
Read Comment
then this is a good place to start. We all know that as a species we aren't looking after the world we live on anything like as much as we should. There are innumerable excuses - green products cost more, not having the time, not knowing what to do. Like a door-to-door peddler of religion, I come bringing GOOD NEWS! There is an easy, affordable way to make your home that little bit more green. I figure, if evryone could do just one thing to be a bit more careful of the environment, then that would be serious progress. Individual action counts.
We're talking washing up liquids here, so I should perhaps start by explaining why your conventionally bubbly is bad. Most washing up liquids are made at least in part from petrochemicals. These do not come to us from renewable sources, so already using them is causing problems, you are helping use up a finite resource. (And long term clearly this isn't going to be viable anyway.) Secondly, these chemicals, although really good at bonding with grease and
making your dishes clean, then stay much as they are, floating round the water system to pollute and require costly efforts to remove them, thus using up more energy and harming the planet merely by their presence. It's hardly a rosey picture. There are a few eco-friendly washing up products out there. They work in much the same way as the conventional ones, bonding the grease to take it off your dishes, but instead of using those limited petrochemical resources, they instead use plant derived material - which of course is sustainable. Salt, lemon juice and vegetable oil are typical ingredients in most cleaning products of this nature. Furthermore, the whole lot will biodegrade, making it far less of a polluter. It's not perfect, its not utterly without effect, but its much better than the mainstream brands.
'But I don't have one of those quirky hippy shops in my high street!' I hear you cry, 'Ill never be able to find this stuff, much less afford it!' Ah ha, well, next time you go to your supermarket, have a look around, and the odds are very good indeed that Ecover will be there alongside the other detergents. Look closely at that price tag, and you will find that whatever your product emporium normally charges for cleaning products, your Ecover will be priced much the same. That's right, it's not going to cost you any more to do this.
Ecover are the biggest and best established brand carrying this sort of thing, but I would like to pause and point out that they aren't the only ones, there are companies out there doing vegan washing up liquid, so anything is possible if you are prepaired to hunt, and believe me, the internet can provide. 'But we all know about green stuff, it doesn't work, that's why we invented proper detergents in the first place.'
Let me gently explode another myth for you. Ecover works perfectly well. On first contact, you may think you've bought a dud, for the simple reason that you don't get a bowl full of bubbles. Those bubbles you are so fond of are largely cosmetic, they don't do much. Use a small squirt of ecover, and you'll find that your dishes come up perfectly well. I think its actualy better for glassware than the Fairy I was using before I saw the light... Anyone with skin (that narrows it down, doesn't it) knows that washing up is not a glorious expereince. If you've got eczema, cuts, scratches and the like, washing up is hell and calls for rubber gloves. Ecover is far more gentle on the hands than any other product from the mainstream producers. However, the soak in water will still dry out the skin, so I tend to use rubber gloves more often than not anyway. However, there's still a bonus, the Ecover is not dissolving my rubber gloves at anything like the pace of my previous cleaning product, so they last longer, so I'm producing less waste, which is exceelent news, and saving money on gloves to boot.
The final point of note, is packaging. Now, packaging is a real bugbear for me, there's almost always too much of it, and far too much still that you can't readily recycle. These bottles are designed with recycling in mind, so if you do have plastic recycling in your area (we don't as yet, sadly) then you can dispose of this to something other than landfill. At least they've tried. One final note, for long years, makers of detergents have been selling us the idea that we need ever stronger products to get rid of every last trace of bacteria in our homes. In parallel to this, conditions like eczema and asthma are on the rise, and our establishments are full of dangerous chemicals. A totally sterile environment is not the optimal one for human life, we need to encounter some bacteria to keep our immune systems ticking over, and continual contact with chemicals does neither us nor our children any good at all. Ecover does not promise to render your home utterly sterile, but you might want to stop and think about whether that's a good thing.
If you want to do your bit for a greener world, this is utterly easy, requiring very little of your time and effort. You get a good cleaning product and happier hands to boot, so what have you got to lose?
Read more on this product
Products you might be interested in
Related tags for Ecover Washing Up Liquid
|
|
by (3%):
22.04.2004 18:23
Good review, I use some of Ecover's other products and will look out for this.
26.03.2004 23:40
Very rewarding (environmentally) & lasts AGES!
28.02.2004 01:02
Do they do ecover dishwasher tablets?