These articles are intended to provide you with a brief overview of what to avoid and what to look for when considering household cleaning products. The format we've chosen could be best described as "bad news, good news." First, we'll look at the various toxic offerings to be found on the shelves of supermarkets and home improvement stores that also may be residing under your kitchen sink. After scaring you silly — or at least giving you serious pause for consideration — with a list of carcinogenic and unpronounceable common ingredients in major household cleaners and accompanying grim statistics, we'll show you how to banish them from your life completely and examine some quite effective, very economical and SAFE alternatives. This will require some attention on your part as a responsible consumer, however.

We've all been conditioned by years of insidiously sophisticated advertising from petrol-chemical hucksters designed to create a previously nonexistent market for their products... petrol-chemical distillates that we got along nicely without until around the 1950's. The petrol-chemical industry outdid itself in convincing us their new products could clean faster and better than the homemade stuff our grandparents made do with, things like vegetable or citrus based cleaners, vinegar, washing soda, borax or baking soda. What they neglected to mention was how costly the widespread use of these cleaners would prove to be: to our health and to the environment.