Green This! Volume One: Greening Your Cleaning

If you want to find a book that gives you practical ways to make environmentally friendly choices for cleaning your home, this isn't the best one out there. The author spends a long time giving you background on the toxins that may or may not be in your home. Everything from your carpet to your toilet cleaner, to your disposable mop pad may be harming your family. But as far as giving a managed approach to making better choices, well, you are on your own. There are some helpful tips in this book, but they aren't organized well, and are always splayed between toxic warnings that seem designed to frighten you.

Pros

Cons

Let's face some facts. There are few of us out there that would willingly set aside green cleaning options that were affordable, semi-convenient, and healthier for our children in favor of toxins. As parents we appear infinitely more educated about potential chemical dangers to our children than our grandparents or even parents were. That's why we seek out tools, cleaners, and books to help us make even cleaning our home, more environmentally friendly.

In my opinion this book is not a helpful addition for most people.

I had high hopes for the book. Instead it seemed like a horror movie outlining all the possible ways that my home and the things in it could harm my family and children. I admit that this annoyed me enough to find the tips that were included to be minimal at best. The author shares homemade recipes that are not as effective as plain water, and methods that take an incredible amount of time for very little result. The author gives a lot of "has been shown to cause...", "has been linked to..." and "potentially toxic" talk. In fact, it's hard to find a place in your home that isn't out to get you. It would stand to reason then, that the book would be filled with simple outlines of steps to take to remove everything toxic from your home. The few tips that are included seem to fall short after a reader has been frightened into believing that everything they own is toxic. Although the author acknowledges that the amount of things to be changed in the average home may feel overwhelming, and that we should take it one step at a time, she fails to outline any helpful steps, and we're left with just fear. If you're buying the book to find out why people should be cleaning green, you might find enough evidence to convince you to make some changes, but if you are looking for help to implement changes, you should look elsewhere.