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Nobody swaps their whole cleaning cupboard in one go. What actually happens is a bottle runs out, you buy a better one, and six months later the cupboard looks different. So rather than a list of thirty things, here are the five swaps that make the biggest difference, roughly in the order we would do them.
The honest answer is fragrance and air. Most of us clean a bathroom with the door shut and the window closed, and conventional sprays are heavily perfumed, which is fine until someone in the house has asthma, eczema or a nose that reacts. Then there are the surfaces small kids put their hands and faces on, and the fact that everything you tip down the sink ends up in the water. You do not need to be frightened of your kitchen spray to think a gentler one is a reasonable idea.
This is the bottle you reach for twenty times a day, so it is the one worth changing first. The refill systems have got genuinely good. You buy a glass bottle once, then top it with water and drop in a tablet when it runs out, which means you stop carting a litre of water home from the shop every few weeks and the bottle under your sink stops being plastic. The refill tablets are a couple of dollars each and post easily, which is why people who start here tend to keep going.
Laundry is the biggest volume of anything you buy, which makes it the swap with the most impact and, if you shop badly, the most cost. Buy the concentrates in the biggest size you can store, because per wash they land close to supermarket prices. Skip fabric softener entirely and put a splash of white vinegar in the softener compartment instead, it softens, it rinses detergent residue out, and no, your towels will not smell like chips. If anyone in the house has sensitive skin, run an extra rinse before you blame the detergent.
Dish liquid concentrate is the easy win here. You use about a third of what you are used to, which people always get wrong for the first week and then never think about again. If you are hand washing, a coconut fibre scourer or a compostable cloth outlasts a supermarket sponge by months and does not go slimy in three days.
Castile soap is the reason a lot of people end up with a smaller cupboard rather than a greener one. One bottle, heavily diluted, will do floors, the bath, hand wash and even the dog. As a rough starting point, a teaspoon in a spray bottle of water for general surfaces, a good squeeze in a bucket for floors, neat on a cloth for the stubborn bits. Tea tree and eucalyptus are the ones people buy for cleaning, the rose and almond tend to end up in the shower.
The one thing to know before you start mixing. Castile soap and vinegar cancel each other out. Put them in the same bottle and you get a curdled white mess that cleans nothing, because you have essentially turned expensive soap back into oil. Use one or the other, and if you want to do both, soap first, rinse, then vinegar. Also go easy with vinegar on natural stone benchtops and unsealed grout, it etches.
Glass cleaner is worth having as its own bottle, because the trick with windows and mirrors is a low residue formula and a dry cloth, not more spray. Soapberries are the curveball, a dried fruit that you tie in a little bag and throw in the machine, and while they will not shift a rugby jersey they are excellent for lightly worn clothes, wool and anyone reacting to everything else. And a decent microfibre or cellulose cloth quietly reduces how much product you use at all.
You do not need all of it at once. Pick the bottle that is closest to empty and start there. The full range is under Cleaning and Laundry, and we carry refills for most of it so you can bring the bottle back rather than buying another one. We are at 936 Anzac Parade, Maroubra, open seven days.
