Washing-up, what a pain. We don’t have a dishwasher, our kitchen is far too small, and given the extremely tiny size of our kitchen, we can’t leave dishes standing very long at all, we have to do them quite quickly. Although to be fair, I don’t do all that many, Lindsay says I do them very badly, so I am not allowed to do them!
Up until about 18 months ago we used the cheap supermarket own brand washing up liquid, and it was ok. But Lindsay was pestering me to try a more natural product, so we started buying the Tesco own brand “Green” washing-up liquid. Which isn’t too bad, bar the fact that lemon is a major ingredient, and guess what, I am allergic to lemons, and it gave me a bit of a rash, a good excuse to get out of doing the dishes, but nothing that Lindsay was happy with. So we needed to find an alternative, now we are pretty much restricted in where we can go to get stuff because we don’t drive, so we are really limited to Tesco. And besides as part of our Ethical living challenge we are reexamining everything we do, and what we use to do it.
When looking at what green washing-up liquids, we can get at Tesco we are pretty much limited to their own brand natural label or Ecover. Now I know that quite a number of people are unhappy with Ecover due to their testing on water fleas, and the fact that its made in Belgium, and thus requires transporting here to the UK, which obviously realses carbon.
Now frankly when it comes to the waterfleas, well they will be exposed to these products no matter what, so I would rather they test the product on them to make sure that the products are safe for them, than for them to just release a product where it is unknown what effect this will have on the fleas. As long as the really nasty stuff has biodegraded before it gets back into the wild water system I am happy.
Now for the transport issue, well first of all Ecover is very concentrated, so we only need one squirt to do a sink full of dishes, so it should last longer than conventional washing up liquid. Secondly we are purchasing it in 1 lite bottles, so few bottles will have to be transported to supermarkets as you will not need to buy them so frequently. And thirdly the bottles are refillable, there are two health food shops in Newcastle where we can take along the bottle and pay to refill it, as opposed to simply throwing it away, although it is fully recyclable, but hey if we avoid making a new one, great!
Now I know people will bang on about Bio-D as being better, but they can’t be refilled and our council have said they don’t recycle the bottles, same issue for Ecover, but we can refill them. Some people do point out we can get Bio-D is available in big boxes from ethicalsuperstore.com, but our flat is very small and we simply don’t have the room to store it, so that rules that out. So for me Ecover wins hands down, despite the extra carbon released by its transport from Belgium, the carbon saved by not bring extra bottles here cause I can refill them more than makes up for it!
Anyway, might try my Nanas recipie for home made washing-up liquid at some point but for now, I will stick with Ecover and let you know how it goes!
God Bless
Michael
