Category Archives: Eco Friendly Home

How Much Should You Worry About Eggs and Salmonella?

The recent major recall of eggs for salmonella has a lot of people wondering about how much they should worry. It’s hard to believe that it took so long for the recall to get started when so many eggs are a potential source for salmonella poisoning.

I’m feeling pretty lucky in that at the moment we’re out of eggs. If any were contaminated, clearly I cooked them well enough that it wasn’t a problem. Lucky us.

That’s one point to remember. Even without a recall, eggs are sometimes contaminated with salmonella. Cook them well and it won’t be a problem for you. That said, I’ve had foods with raw egg plenty of times without trouble. Raw cookie dough, for example.

Of course, if you have any eggs that are effected by the recall, get rid of them or return them to the store. There’s no point in taking a chance with contaminated eggs.

Will Free Range Eggs Help?

I love free range eggs. My sister has chickens, so I get them from her occasionally. She doesn’t live close enough for this to be a regular thing, however.

While eggs from free range chickens are not a part of this recall, they can still become contaminated by salmonella. You can’t see the difference, so looking at the eggs won’t help.

On the other hand, really free range eggs (not just chickens set free for a short time then recaged) are a good thing in general. Better for the chickens and you get better eggs. There’s a lot to be said that’s positive for finding a source of free range eggs.

I would suggest that there are better sources for free range eggs than the grocery store, however. If you know someone who raises chickens, that’s a good source. A farm that you can visit and see how they treat their chickens is a good source.

The grocery shelf, not so much. Free range is too loosely defined.

When to Worry

The only thing you need to worry more than usual about is if you have eggs directly effected by this recall. Otherwise, temper your new reminder of the potential for salmonella poisoning from eggs with your lifelong experience. Odds are good it hasn’t been a problem for you before.

12 Ways to Naturally Keep Your Home’s Air Cleaner

I posted the other day about how to keep the air in your home smelling better naturally. Controlling the smell is only a part of the battle. You want to keep the air in your home clean and healthy. These are some steps you can take to help the air inside your home stay cleaner.

1. Take off your shoes when you come inside.

Shoes track in a lot of dirt when you come into the house. That’s anything you walked on that was outside. Even if you don’t use them yourself, others in your neighborhood probably use pesticides and fertilizers, which make their way into the dust and dirt around everyone’s homes. Your shoes track these and other dirt into your home.

Keep a mat outside every door for people to wipe their feet before coming inside.

Fortunately, going barefoot is pretty good for feet. It gives them a break from being confined inside your shoes. If you really don’t like going barefoot, buy some slippers or other comfortable house shoes to wear only indoors.

2. Have hardwood, tile or other hard floor materials.

Hard floor surfaces are much easier to keep clean than carpets. You can keep your carpets looking clean, but they trap a lot of dust and dirt that make it into the air of your home.

You’ll probably still put in some area rugs, so pick ones that have low piles or can easily be taken outside to be cleaned.

For the carpets you can’t take out, use a vacuum with HEPA filters or use microfiltration vacuum bags to keep better control of the dust stirred up by vacuuming.

3. Use natural cleaners around the house.

The more chemicals you use to clean your home, the more chemicals will build up in the air inside your home. Natural cleaners may still contaminate the air in their way, but their ingredients should be safer for your lungs..

4. Open the windows.

Outdoor air in most places is cleaner than indoor air. Let the air flow through when weather permits.

5. Use low VOC paints when repainting.

If you’re painting inside your home, choose low VOC (volatile organic compound) paints. They don’t smell as bad and release fewer compounds into the air of your home. Varnish and carpets also contain VOCs, so pay attention when buying any of these.

6. Check your air filters.

If you have a heater or air conditioner, check the filters regularly. Some filters can be cleaned and put back in, while others will need to be replaced when they get dirty.

7. Don’t allow smoking indoors.

If you, anyone in your family or anyone who visits you smokes, ask that it be kept outside. The rest of the people in your home don’t need to breathe those chemicals.

8. Don’t let the car idle in the garage.

Air from the garage gets into the rest of your home. You know how bad car exhaust smells and that it’s unhealthy for you. Why would you want that inside your home? Be ready to pull the car out of the garage shortly after starting it to minimize the pollution it add to your home.

9. Keep the humidity down.

Daily life inside a home can increase the humidity of a home. Just think how humid the bathroom is after a shower. Humid air makes for good conditions for mold to grow. Run bathroom fans or open the window after showering or bathing to let the humid air out.

10. Don’t use pesticides indoors.

It’s tough finding out you have bugs in the house, especially hard to control ones. If you can at all help it, don’t use pesticides inside your home, as they will contaminate the air as well as the areas you sprayed them.

Prevention is best to keep the bugs away. If you’re starting to see them, figure out what they’re after. If you can clean it up, they aren’t going to be as interested, although you may need to take more steps to get rid of them.

Some pests can be gotten rid of more easily than others. You can get rid of some kinds of ants with a mixture of borax and corn syrup, for example. Others you will need to set bait traps.

11. Rethink your personal care supplies.

Some of the supplies you use in your daily personal care routine aren’t too good for your indoor air quality. This is especially true of anything you spray, such as perfumes and hair sprays. Look for options that you still like but don’t have as many VOCs.

12. Grow houseplants.

Houseplants look nice, can smell nice and they clean the air of your home naturally. I know I mentioned them in the previous post, but they bear repeating.

Are You Replacing Too Much in an Attempt to be Green?

Living an eco friendly life is complicated at times. There are usually a lot of things you want to buy that are more eco friendly than what you own now, but when is that the right choice? When does it make more sense environmentally speaking to buy new?

Appliances and Electronics – It’s Not All About Efficiency

Replacing appliances and electronics can be a tough decision, and much of it depends on just how bad the old version is. Really old refrigerators are likely good prospects for replacement when you’re ready. Newer models are much more efficient and you should quickly see a decrease in your power bills. Just make sure the old one is sent off to a good recycling program.

Laptop computers are much more efficient in terms of energy use than desktop models, but that’s not necessarily a good reason to change computers. Could you improve the energy use of your desktop by turning off more often, and even switching off the power to its surge suppressor so there’s no standby power use or power used by anything else plugged into the same strip such as the monitor and printer?

Electronics can be problematic in general due to recycling issues. When it comes time to replace some of your old electronics, make sure you think about how you’re disposing of the old. There are some pretty toxic metals inside them.

Plastics

Getting rid of plastics is an environmental issue and possibly a health issue as well. People can argue about whether or not BPA is a problem, but there’s no denying that plastic is an environmental problem. Search for pictures of the Pacific Garbage Patch if you doubt that.

They’re incredibly hard to get rid of completely. Plastic comes into our homes in so many ways.

Plastic wraps some of the foods we buy from the grocery store. It’s used in the bags many stores use when you make a purchase. It’s used in water bottles and food storage containers. It’s used to make bottles that hold cleaning and personal care supplies. It’s all over the place.

Some areas it’s easy to say that you should buy something to replace the plastic you’d be using otherwise. A good quality reusable shopping bag – not one of the cheapies sold by the grocery store for a dollar, but a good one – should last a long time, be washable and keep you from having your purchases put into a plastic bag.

A stainless steel water bottle is a great replacement for buying disposable plastic water bottles. Pick good quality and it will last for years. You’ll even save money over time in comparison to buying water in disposable bottles. And I don’t mean all that much time if you’ve been buying a lot of water.

Invest in a good filter if you really aren’t used to the flavor of tap water. Plastic may be involved in at least the casing of the filter, but as I’ve said – it’s really hard to avoid plastics.

Clothes

If you’re replacing perfectly good clothes with eco friendly versions, you may be doing it wrong. What you have has already done whatever environmental damage inherent in its creation. So long as you choose eco friendly laundry detergents, there’s nothing wrong with continuing to use what you have until it wears out.

When to Replace?

In general, save the eco friendly shopping for when something really needs replacement. Don’t go chasing after the latest, greatest eco friendly whatever. That’s called consumerism and it’s very easy to fall for.

When you’re replacing something, think about how you’re disposing of it. Could you or someone else reuse or repurpose it? Can it be recycled? Is it honestly just trash?

Use things until they really aren’t worth keeping, and then think if they need to be replaced. Sometimes reduce is the real answer. Buying just because it’s the latest eco item to catch your attention is not a good reason to buy anything.

Is Scraping the Dishes Enough for Your Dishwasher?

These days I always hear that you don’t need to rinse your dishes before putting them into the dishwasher. They say with modern dishwashers and dishwasher detergents, it’s not only unnecessary, it makes it harder for the detergent to work correctly. They say the detergent breaks down the bits of food.

Does it work for you? It sure doesn’t for me!

It doesn’t matter if I use an eco friendly dishwasher detergent such as the one from Seventh Generation, or one of the usual suspects. If the dishes have more than an insignificant amount of food on them, I get food dust all through the glasses on the top shelf. It’s disgusting.

I do still need to try Ecover, which is well rated on Amazon.

My way of handling this is to scrape first. I have a good scraper my mother gave me, and spoons do a fair job on some surfaces too. Sometimes the flat and flexible surface of the scraper does a better job, though. An alternative to buying a scraper is to use an expired credit card – they’re flexible and have a good enough edge for the job.

Then a sink of water for rinsing, rather than running the faucet, at least if several are being done at once. Running the water is wasteful if there’s more than a few dishes to rinse.

Honestly, I’d love it if dishes only needed to be scraped to get clean in the dishwasher. A big part of why they’re supposed to be more water efficient is that you shouldn’t always need to rinse dishes now. Too bad it doesn’t work that way for me.

Does it work that way for anyone?