Jane Anderson is a co-founder of Figgy & Co which makes chemical-free cleaning products.
The company is making some of its recipes available for free for people to make themselves - you can get all their recipes from their website and go make your own, or you can buy them ready-made.
The ingredients they use to make their products are decidedly old-school, she told Karyn Hay.
“We looked back a couple of generations and came up with an ingredient list from 50 or 60 years ago, things that our grandparents would have recognised.”
There is a science to making your own cleaning products she says, although it’s not too complicated.
“You do need to be aware of the pH scale, so typically you want to clean with an alkali and rinse with an acid
“So you would clean with something like washing soda, baking soda or soap and then you would rinse with something like vinegar or citric acid.”
Taking two steps, rather than mixing together is important.
“If you add them together, they will react together, and you will basically come out with water and what they call a salt and no cleaning happens.
“That catches a lot of people out when they mix the vinegar and soda together.”
So, if you want to clean the toilet with baking soda and vinegar, soda first then a vinegar rinse, she says.
“I would use the baking soda as a scrub and it’s also got deodorising properties so I would shake that around and use your brush and then scrub and leave for a little bit, because baking soda does a bit of whitening, then a second scrub and flush. And then I would use the vinegar as a disinfectant later on - spray to get rid of any lingering bugs.”
Anderson first became interested in chemical-free cleaning when she was pregnant and wanted to use chemical-free shampoo.
“I used a dilute solution of baking soda - you rinse that through your hair, washing with alkali that we talked about before, a bit of hot water and you give your scalp a massage.
“And then you rinse with the vinegar, apple cider vinegar or white vinegar.
“By the time your hair dries, because vinegar is such an amazing deodoriser, your hair just smells fresh and clean - it doesn’t smell like vinegar at all.”
Now she doesn’t use any cleaner on her hair at all.
“I started with that, and followed that for about a year, and now I find I don’t even need to do either of those - I just rinse my hair in hot water.”
Figgy and Co makes its own laundry powder, and she says if you are washing short cycle, in cold water, be aware commercial powders will have more chemicals in them as a result.
“The cleaning industry has come to the party by increasing the chemicals in laundry powder in order to achieve that economy of time and temperature, and I think that’s why you’ll find so many people are having skin reactions to a lot of the laundry powders that are on the market.
“It’s because if you change one element, temperature or time duration, you’re going to have to backfill and increase the chemicals that are there to do the cleaning work.”
She says she is happy to share these chemical-free recipes for free
“We want to demystify making your own cleaners because it does not need to be complicated, it is not hard, everyone is smart enough to do this.”
