Non-toxic cleaning products: what we actually use

Buy fewer things

The single most effective change in this category is not switching brands. It is owning fewer products.

A kitchen needs an all-purpose spray, a dish soap, a laundry detergent, and something mildly abrasive for the bathroom. That is close to the whole list. The rest of the aisle is largely the same chemistry, repackaged for a specific room and marketed as though the room required it.

Cutting your shelf in half halves the number of formulations in your home, and it does it before you have read a single ingredient list.

The one thing to screen for

If you change nothing else, screen for fragrance.

That single word — "fragrance" or "parfum" — can stand in for a large undisclosed mixture, and in cleaning products it has historically been the most common route by which phthalates enter a house. It is also the ingredient most likely to bother anyone with asthma or reactive skin.

After that: quaternary ammonium compounds ("quats" — benzalkonium chloride and relatives), which are common in disinfectant sprays and wipes and are respiratory irritants; and any product that will not tell you what is in it. Cleaning products are not required to disclose the way food and cosmetics are, so full disclosure is a deliberate choice by a brand. Treat it as your minimum bar.

And never mix cleaners. Bleach with ammonia, or bleach with vinegar or any acid, produces toxic gas. This is the genuinely dangerous thing in the cleaning cupboard, and it has nothing to do with whether the products were natural.

What we keep

ATTITUDE's all-purpose spray is the top pick because it is the easiest swap to actually make: inexpensive, widely available, fully disclosed, and it replaces the bottle most people reach for most often.

Puracy's concentrate is the better value if you are willing to dilute — you stop paying to ship water, and the cost per bottle drops a lot.

Blueland's tablet system answers the plastic problem as much as the chemical one: a refillable bottle and tablets you drop into water, rather than a new spray bottle every month.

Dr. Bronner's Baby Unscented castile soap is the base for most homemade recipes and a genuinely versatile product on its own. Get the unscented version — the scented ones are pleasant and defeat the point of screening for fragrance.

Branch Basics is the premium end. One concentrate dilutes into several different cleaners. Expensive up front, and the cost per use is low if you stick with it.

On the certifications

You will see EWG Verified on several of these, including our top pick, and it is worth understanding what it is.

It means a product met EWG's ingredient criteria and disclosed its full formulation — a genuinely useful signal. It is also a paid certification program: brands apply and pay to carry the mark. So it tells you a company chose to submit and passed. It does not tell you that unmarked products failed, because most never applied.

We flag this partly because we have written about our own reservations with EWG's cleaning database, where we found rated ingredient lists that did not match the labels on the products in front of us. EWG does important work and we use it. We just do not treat any single rating as the end of the question — and neither should you with ours.

EPA Safer Choice is the other mark worth knowing. It is a government program rather than a paid certification, and it evaluates every ingredient in a formulation against safety criteria. Where you see it, it is meaningful.

If you would rather make it

The honest version: vinegar and baking soda handle a lot, and they cost almost nothing.

Two things people get wrong. Mixed together, they neutralise each other — the dramatic fizzing is mostly the reaction consuming both, so use them separately rather than combining them into a paste and expecting more. And keep vinegar off natural stone, where the acid etches the surface.

One caution before building a routine around a classic recipe: EPA's own risk assessment for boron compounds, which includes borax, sets its reference dose based on decreased fetal weight in animal developmental-toxicity studies — a real enough concern that it rules out a lot of the homemade dishwasher detergent formulas in circulation.

Our rule here is the same as everywhere else on this page — less is more. A handful of things, used properly, will keep a house clean.

The one cleaning job most households hire out is carpet, and the questions there are different: what is in the solution, how long the carpet stays damp, and whether a fragrance lingers once it dries. Our carpet-cleaning review covers what to ask before you book, whichever company you use.