Seventh Generation

As many of you are well aware, I am not a very domestic person, so this is a weird post for me to be making...but lately I've been trying to clean greener, and as I'm also trying to update my journal more often, voilà, an entry about environmentally friendlier household products.

I started out by substituting things like baking soda and vinegar for general-purpose cleaners because I didn't want to mop the floors and clean the carpets and bathroom with stuff that could poison my pets, and that's worked out fantastically well. The past couple of weeks I've been trying Seventh Generation products--paper towels, laundry detergent, trash bags, and so on. I figured that if I found environmentally friendlier stuff that worked as well as what I'd been using, I'd be willing to switch over even though it does cost more. (Paper towels especially; like any pet owner, I go through a ridiculous amount of paper toweling, no matter how good I try to be about using washable cloths instead.) I used a drugstore.com coupon to pick up some things from the site's Seventh Generation store, and then found a whole shelf of SG products in my local supermarket and grabbed a roll of the toilet paper to try too.

I haven't done a lick of research into claims like this made by the company...

If every household in the U.S. replaced just one bottle of 25 oz. petroleum based dishwashing liquid with our 25 oz. vegetable based product, we could save 81,000 barrels of oil, enough to heat and cool 4,600 U.S. homes a year!

...but they sure sound good, and here's what I thought of the stuff I tried.

( thumbs-up on five out of six )

Now to hope I can find this stuff cheaper in quantity at a place like BJ's or Costco.