Today my guest is Becky Rapinchuk of CleanMama.net, a blog that tells you how to simplify and organizee your housekeeping while also using nontoxic cleaners. Becky is the author of The Organically Clean Home, and offers free printables on her site, such as cleaning recipes for using castile soap, lemons, borax, vinegar, and baking soda. 
Has been featured on Oprah.com and HGTV and has also provided content and cleaning consulting for Scotch-Brite (3M), Peapod/Reckitt, Cafemom.com, and Bissell. Circle of Moms named Clean Mama one of the Top 25 Home Management Blogs, iVillage named her as one of the 10 Organizers You Should Be Following on Pinterest, and Skinny Scoop named Clean Mama one of the Top 25 Organization Blogs. Rapinchuk is also Answer.com’s housekeeping expert. www.cleanmama.net
Becky’s Free 55 Simple Cleaning Recipes for using castile soap, lemons, borax, vinegar and baking soda to clean your house.
TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
The Organically Clean Home
Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Becky Rapinchuk
Date of Broadcast: May 7, 2014
DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world, and live toxic-free.
It’s Wednesday, May 7, 2014. Today, we’re going to be talking about cleaning your house—your favorite thing. Not my favorite thing, but I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about cleaning, and she said that she loves to clean her house because she loves how beautiful it is at the end, and how orderly it is, and how beautiful to have a shiny surface on your table.
And I thought that that was just lovely because I do like my house to look nice. I look like my house to be orderly and beautiful, and cleaning it is the way to get there. Interesting.
So today, my guest is Becky, I hope I’m saying this right, Rapinchuk. She’ll correct me. I’ll ask her. She’s has a blog named CleanMamma.net, and she’s written a book called “The Organically Clean Home” that has 150 recipes for making your own cleaners at home.
So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.
The thing that’s different about Becky that I’ll tell you is that her book and her website actually organizes you, helps you organize yourself to get your cleaning done in a non-toxic way. And that’s the key difference, I think, is actually getting it done.
Hi, Becky.
BECKY RAPINCHUK: Hi. How are you?
DEBRA: I’m good. And how do you say your name?
BECKY RAPINCHUK: You said it correctly. It’s Rapinchuk.
DEBRA: Rapinchuk, good. Do you remember the Mary Tyler Moore Show?
BECKY RAPINCHUK: I do. I just watched it the other night actually.
DEBRA: I used to when I was a kid. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was my favorite show. And every Saturday night, I would be right there to watch the Mary Tyler Moore Show. And you know, there was Ted the newscaster, who could never pronounce anything.
And I understand exactly his situation because people come on the show, and suddenly, I look at their name and I go, “How am I supposed to say that?”
I can say that because people have difficulty saying my name too. And I’m on the radio. They don’t know how to pronounce my name.
So Rapinchuk, Becky Rapinchuk, CleanMama.net, and her book is “The Organically Clean Home.”
Becky, how did you get interested in writing about non-toxic cleaners?
BECKY RAPINCHUK: Well, it started a long time ago—years ago, I guess, when my oldest sprayed cleaning products on her face. And I had bought from watching commercials. They showed it to be used on high chairs, tables and tabletops, and places where kids were.
And it was supposed to be sprayed right around them, and it was totally safe, supposedly.
But once she sprayed it all over herself, I panicked a little bit and read the back, and it said you had to call poison control. That was where I said, “Hold on.”
This is marketed for moms. You don’t need to rinse it. You’re supposed to spray it on their high chairs, what they’re eating off of. And it’s toxic?
So that was where I started doing a little investigating, and I just started looking for non-toxic cleaners to purchase, and safer, more environmentally-sound cleaners. And it was pretty expensive, just because I was trying all these different things, trying to find the right thing that worked.
When I started the process, it was about eight years ago, and there weren’t quite as many options on the market at that point. And frankly, they didn’t work very well. They just weren’t up to my expectations, I guess.
After years of sampling different cleaners and trying to find something that would actually work that I enjoyed working with, and that I didn’t feel like was playing a huge dent in the back of my pocket, I started making my own cleaners, and realizing that that way, I would know exactly how much of any given ingredient was in it, what I was using, what it smelled like, what it didn’t smell like.
So that was where that quest came for me. It was an eye-opening experience and scary, nonetheless, that I just had no idea.
And I would also say that I tend to err on the side of germaphobe. And so when my daughter was little, I wanted everything to be germ-free. That was real big concern for me too, so I just really had a hard time coming to grips with the actual cleaning process.
It doesn’t have to be sanitized. We’re not in a hospital. Just [meeting] that difference too.
DEBRA: Well, I can appreciate all the work that went into this. I’ve been making my own cleaning products for more than 30 years because when I first became interested in this subject back in 1978 actually, there were no books like yours or mine.
And so I couldn’t just go to a book and find out, “Well, how am I supposed to clean my house now if I wanted to avoid toxic chemicals?”
And so I just started out with baking soda and vinegar, and finding out how to use those, and regular soap. And that’s still what I clean my house with.
So I’m really interested to read all these other 150 recipes because you’re giving recipes for how to do things like clean your showerhead. I’ve never cleaned my showerhead. But I think we probably should.
And you’ve got tile cleaner, and citrus wood cleaner, and toy cleaner, and room freshening spray, and all these things that I don’t ever do. You’re giving me new ways to clean my house.
But I know it works. I know that what all these recipes that Becky is giving you in this book, I know that the whole concept works. I know that it works to use baking soda, vinegar, soap and lemon juice. She uses about a dozen different non-toxic ingredients.
And you just get those basic things, start mixing, and you can very inexpensively clean your house for most reasons that you might want to clean it and not have any plastic bottles that go to the landfill, and all those kinds of things.
So this is a really great thing.
I’d like us to say a little bit about what the toxic chemicals are, and problems with toxic cleaning products? Do you want to talk about that?
BECKY RAPINCHUK: Yes. I think that the big issue is that if you look at the back of a label of any cleaning product, or a lot of cleaning products that are in the store, there are ingredients that you don’t recognize. The problem is we don’t know that maybe it says it’s flammable, so you’ll think, “Well, I’m not going to put it near my heating vent, so I’m fine.”
But when you actually start to investigate what’s in the product, it’s so much worse than just being flammable. It’s because it’s caustic.
Fumes can be produced if you use it in a small space. If your child gets into, it could send them to the emergency room or worse.
People aren’t educated to know that just because it says it’s safe for your family, it doesn’t mean that it really is. And you really need to take responsibility for what you’re putting into your home, and on your kitchen table, and in your washing machine, as well as what you’re putting back into the environment too as it washes on the drain. Those things also leech back into your drinking water.
To me that’s a little snippet of the problem with the toxic chemicals.
DEBRA: Also, in addition to that, most cleaning products, because not 100% of them, there are some things you can go to the supermarket and buy [Bon Ami’s]. It’s totally non-toxic.
But most cleaning products that you’re going to see at the supermarket are actually household hazardous waste. If you don’t use all of them, you’re supposed to take them to the household hazardous waste disposal. They’re not supposed to go in the trash. And they’re governed by those laws as hazardous waste.
Also, another thing is that cleaning products are not required by law to even put their ingredients on the label. So if there are some ingredients on the label, there are probably a lot of ingredients that are not listed.
When I first started researching cleaning products, I had to go to industry—we’ll take a break, and we’ll talk a little bit about this more when we come back.
You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Becky Rapinchuk. Her website is CleanMama.net. And you should go there because she has a lot of information. She has a blog. She’s got some free stuffs that you can download. And she’s the author of The Organically Clean Home.
We’ll be right back.
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, my guest is Becky Rapinchuk. She’s at CleanMama.net, and the author of “The Organically Clean Home.”Before the break, we were talking about cleaning products being household hazardous waste. And I actually wanted to say, so all you listeners know, that cleaning products are regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and though the 1960 Federal Hazardous Substances Labeling Act.
This is really important to know because every type of product is labeled differently. And the law about cleaning products is that they are not required to list everything on the label, but they are required to put warning labels on like “toxic,” “extremely toxic,” “corrosive,” “sensitizer,” “danger,” “warning,” “caution,” and skull and crossbones like you see on drain cleaner. It has skull and crossbones.
Originally, these warning labels meant bad. They actually meant something that they showed a degree of toxicity, but over time, that’s all been eroded.
So here we have a situation where we have probably the most toxic products in your home that children can, if they are under the sink, just grab them and drink them, and be very harmed.
But the warning labels, we can’t find out what’s in them because it’s not required for the manufacturers to reveal that. The warning labels are not always correct, and as Becky mentioned, they’re being advertised as being safe when they aren’t.
And all of these are reasons to just skip them all together, the commercial products.
Now, of course, there are some products that are much better than the most toxic ones, and some brands that you’ll find in the nature food store that these are immensely better.
But as Becky said, and I totally agree with her, this is really an area of life where you want to know what’s in the product. You really want to know what’s in the product. And when you make them yourselves, you have total control over what goes in it, you can make a product that is unscented, you can make it scented with an essential oil that is one that you like, and you just have total control.
And I like having total control over my environment.
So Becky, let’s talk about some of your cleaning recipes, but before that, first, let’s talk about organizing because I think that probably it’s just as important to know how to organize your cleaning, so that you feel in control of what you’re doing, and you know it’s getting done, as it is what products you’re using.
So give us some first hints about organizing.
BECKY RAPINCHUK: I think having a cleaning routine is key. My cleaning routine is essentially in my head at this point. I just know on Mondays, I clean the bathrooms, and Tuesdays, I dust, and I have specific jobs that I take care of around the home every day, and then specific jobs that I rotate through the week.
And having that organized just makes it on autopilot. It keeps it easier. It doesn’t make it as big of a deal as you might think it is.
DEBRA: When I first saw this, I thought, “A cleaning routine? Gee, you do something every day. How do you find the time?”
And then I thought, “She must be cleaning all day long.”
But then I thought, no. Actually, what happens to me is that I’m very busy with my work as many people are. And I’m sure you are too.
But I’m so busy with that that I’m not even thinking about this. And then I get to the end of the week, and it’s Saturday, and I’ve got a load of laundry, and I need to dust, and I need to do this and do that.
And it doesn’t all get done.
And so I can see that if I were to integrate cleaning into my life on a daily basis and say, “Okay, I’m going to do my laundry on Monday,” that it could actually get done because I could put in a load. And fortunately, I work at home, so I could put in a load of laundry, come and work, take out the laundry, and it just gets integrated into life instead of piled up.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:And I think that’s the key. If you hadn’t been doing a cleaning routine, and you decided you’re going to follow mine, so Mondays, we clean all the bathrooms. And that’s the big task for the day.
It might take you longer, but if you start cleaning your bathrooms every Monday, it’s much quicker because it’s not all piled up, and there isn’t a whole bunch of toothpaste on the mirror that you have to clean off. It’s just a quick wipe down, quick spray, quick clean and move on.
I think that everyone’s busy and having to waste time cleaning on a whole Saturday or before you’re having company coming, have to throw your whole house into shape before they come, it’s a shame because it can be a 10 to 15 minutes a day routine if you just start making yourself do that.
That’s where the organization part of cleaning routine comes in.
I have one that works really well for me, works really well readers of my blog, and instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, I always suggest just try mine. And then just decide what doesn’t work for you, and tweak for yourself.
But just start with one because if you’re anything like me, if I’m actually working, trying to formulate this cleaning routine, I’d get all caught up in the formulation of it. And by the time it comes to clean, I’m sick of it. I don’t want to do it anyway.
So just try someone’s cleaning routine, see what works for you and what doesn’t.
And another thing that I think is really helpful is to do a load of laundry every day. If it’s one person, if it’s just you in your house, or you and a spouse, you might not have to do a load of laundry every day. But if you have three kids like I do, if you don’t do laundry every day, you’ll be doing it for an entire day.
DEBRA: Yes, I’ve had that experience.
Talking about routines, one of the things that I decided that I needed to do in my life some time ago was to learn how to manage my money. And you can read all kinds of books about managing your money, but I figured out that what I needed to do was manage it in a way that worked for me.
And it was this gradual process to not doing my bookkeeping at all, to just looking at the account statement at the end of the month, to keeping track of it monthly, and then keeping track of it weekly. And then I went to keeping track of it daily.
And so every morning, I would get up and say, “Okay, I’m going to take this 10 minutes and just see where I am financially.”
And that actually ended up working out the best because every day, I knew how much money I had, how much money I needed, what bill I need to pay, and nothing was late, and I wasn’t overdrawn, and any of those things.
And so I think that it was just a matter of learning what worked best for me. And I think that now, you’re bringing to my attention that I could apply the idea of a routine to cleaning also. And then my house would always be in order and clean.
We need to go to break. We need to go to break, but we’ll be right back. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. My guest is Becky Rapinchuk of CleanMama.net. She’s the author of The Organically Clean Home, and we’ll be right back.
DEBRA:You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Becky Rapinchuk. She’s at CleanMama.net, and the author of The Organically Clean Home.
As I said, she’s got lots of stuff to download. She’s got some free stuffs and paid stuff all about organizing and non-toxic cleaners you can make at home.
So Becky, I’m looking in your book at the section called “A Cleaning Routine that Works.” Why don’t we just go through the cleaning routine of what you do each day? And we’ll talk a little bit about how you do these things, and I’m [inaudible 00:19:02] the fact that you do them.
So on Monday, what you do is sweep the floors. So tell us how you sweep the floors.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:Every day there are four tasks that I do. And so sweep the floors is one, and that’s usually more of a check of the floors. So under the kitchen table is typically a hot spot where crumbs and different things that need to be cleaned up. So I do a little sweep or vacuum under the kitchen table.
Then the mudroom needs a little sweep. And if there’s anything in the bathrooms that needs a specific sweeping, usually, I just wait and do that on my actual vacuuming day. But every day, I just do a visual quick check of the floors.
DEBRA: And then you do a de-clutter.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:De-clutter for me is anything on the surfaces that doesn’t belong there. So the stack of mail that needs to be put away. The kids come home and empty their backpacks, and there is more paper than there should be. So that needs to be sorted.
Most of it just ends up being recycled, but those are the things that clutter up.
And then [inaudible 00:20:29] little toys around the table. There are different things that just need to be tidied up and checked up for the day.
I find that doing a de-clutter, typically, it will be right around in the morning, after everyone goes to school or before they go to school.
If I can get them to cooperate, to do a little de-clutter or before bed, we definitely, every night, set the time for 5 to 10 minutes, then run around and pick stuff up, and then get ready for bed.
DEBRA: I think you just said an important thing. I was thinking about time. You said you set the timer, and then you just do it for that period of time.
I think it comes into play with people thinking like me that we don’t have time to do this.
I have a friend who does things in 15-minute increments, which is even too long for me. She plays the cello and she has given herself 15 minutes a day to practice her cello, even though she’s very, very busy. She takes out 15 minutes to practice her cello, and she even was writing a book 15 minutes a day. That’s her time period.
If she wants to do something, she can give herself 15 minutes
But I was even thinking—I once timed how long a minute is. And a minute actually sounds like not very much time. But it’s amazing to set a timer for one minute, and see how much you can get done in a minute.
And I was thinking, even if I just said, “Okay, I’m going to take one minute to just look around and see how much I can put away in one minute.”
When I first ready de-clutter, the first thing that came to my mind was somebody having a very, very messy house. And I don’t have a messy house, but I have lived with people who are very, very messy.
But there are things like I’ll come home, and if there is a clean surface like my dining table, and I’m tired, I’ll just drop everything on the dining table. And it needs to get put away.
And so even if I were to take one minute or two minutes, and just handle those little things on a daily basis, I think that would really work.
BECKY RAPINCHUK: Yes, and I think even if you were someone that have an incredibly messy house, and you didn’t know where to start, if you just said, “I’m going to de-clutter for five minutes every day,” and it might take you six months.
DEBRA:Yes, but the house would change.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:But it will change, and then that process will continue, and it will just be easier every single day.
DEBRA:Yes, I think that’s a really important point.
So then item #3 of your four is to do a load of laundry, which we already mentioned, and then wipe counters.
But what I’d like you to tell us is let’s talk about the products that you make to do your laundry because you mentioned here having a laundry detergent. Do you know what page that’s on? I just want to go and look at it.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:Let’s see here. I have a couple of different recipes.
DEBRA:Yes, what are they?
BECKY RAPINCHUK:But on page 108 is where it starts. And that’s lemon and clove powdered laundry soap.
DEBRA:There it is. So tell us about that recipe.
BECKY RAPINCHUK: I used castile soap, a bar of that, two cups of borax, two cups of washing soda, a cup of baking soda, and then lemon essential oil and clove essential oil. The bar soap is grated, and I just do that by hand, and then carefully mix the powders together.
I do it in a large, plastic bag just because you don’t want to inhale any of that dust no matter what are those. So I just mix it up that way, and put it in a jar, and just add two tablespoons per load to my wash.
It’s a great formula, it completely dissolves, and I really like the addition of the castile soap, the vegetable-based soap to it.
DEBRA:So you don’t have any problem with hard water? Maybe you don’t have hard water, but sometimes people have difficulty using soap-based products in hard water.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:I haven’t, and I have tested in hard water, soft water, and it’s the same result that the soap completely dissolves. I haven’t had that problem.
DEBRA:This looks like it would save a lot of money too.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:Yes, it’s a great formula, and I like the lemon and the clove. That’s my personal favorite essential oil combination, but you could also not use any essential oil, or you could use peppermint and eucalyptus or lavender and orange.
With each recipe, I try to give a couple of different combinations of scents that you could try.
DEBRA:These look like really good recipes. I’ve been doing this a while, so I have an idea of what works, and you’ve got some good ones too.
So then what do you wipe your counters with?
BECKY RAPINCHUK:It depends. I have granite countertops, so sometimes, I would just mix up liquid castile soap and warm water, and use a sponge and wash them down, or I’ll mix up my all-purpose cleaner as well. If I need to disinfect, I’ll use a disinfecting cleaner.
And I can go into that more. I think we’re going to a break.
DEBRA: Yes, we do need to go to the break. We’ll go to the break, and then when we come back, we’ll talk about disinfecting because I know that that’s a big question for a lot of people.
This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and we’re talking today with Becky Rapinchuk from CleanMama.net, and her book is The Organically Clean Home. We’ll be right back.
DEBRA:You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and today, my guest is Becky Rapinchuk of CleanMama.net. Her book is The Organically Clean Home.
So Becky, tell us about disinfectants. I actually looked them up during the break, and I see that you have quite a few for different reasons.
BECKY RAPINCHUK: Well, it depends. Sometimes you’re going to need to actually [inaudible 00:27:23]. And you can do that naturally. You don’t need toxic chemicals to eradicate germs.
One of my favorite ways to disinfect is with tea tree oil. The scent is strong, but after you use a little bit, you get more used to it. But it definitely does a great job with disinfecting, killing germs. Tea tree oil can also be used to get rid of mold.
If you have a little bit of mold on your grout and your bathroom, you can spray that and it will take care of that as well without having to use bleach, which is what people mostly use for that.
I have a couple of different recipes. Some of them are for bathrooms specifically, or just for countertops, or for kitchens. A lot of the disinfecting has to do with the scent to.
Some people don’t like the smell of vinegar. It has taken me a while to come around to the smell. If that would be someone like you, you can also use a little bit of vinegar and vodka as well, or rubbing alcohol. I have a great recipe for the bathroom disinfecting that’s on page 84, and it has vinegar, vodka, lavender and lemon essential oil and water.
I’d love that smells. It’s very subtle, and it also does a great job with disinfecting bathroom counters. You could use it in your kitchen as well if you wanted to, but that’s a good one.
DEBRA: I just wanted to mention something I wrote in a book that’s no longer in print called Home Safe Home. I told a story about I was going through my great aunt’s things after her death. It was my responsibility to take care of all of her things. And I found a book. I found a very old book that was about making perfume.
It was published in England in 1927. And in that book, they were talking about how they found that the women that worked in the flower-growing district of France had fewer number cases of tuberculosis.
And so they started looking at this, and they found that there were all these flowers that even just being exposed to them as flowers turned out to be disinfectants.
And so there was a list in the book of the most disinfecting plant oils, essential oils, and listed in order for their bactericidal properties.
And the highest one, the best one was cinnamon, and then cloves, verbena, lavender, patchouli, angelica, juniper, sandalwood, cedar, thyme, lemon, pine, wormwood and extracts of jasmine and tuberose.
So any of those essential oils actually could be added to a homemade recipe in order to make give it more disinfecting qualities.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:That’s fascinating too.
DEBRA:Yes, old research. I’ve been working in this field for more than 30 years, and I was just thinking the other day about how 30 years ago, there was information of a certain type that was widely available. And nowadays, even that information from 30 years ago isn’t available, and how as time goes by, we tend to lose information.
And so you think about information like this that is almost a hundred years ago, they knew this, and we don’t know it now.
And so one of the things that I often do when I’m looking for something non-toxic is that I go look at the past because we’ve only had so many toxic chemicals since mid-1940’s. Not that there weren’t toxic chemicals before that but the great proliferation of everything being made out of petroleum has only been since the 1940’s.
And prior to that people did everything we do today. Well, they didn’t have computers, but they wore clothes, and they did their laundry, and they cleaned their house, and they wrote letters, and all these things. And they did everything without those toxic chemicals.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:That’s amazing.
DEBRA:Yes, it is amazing. It was a different world, and this is a different world. I look at how life has change since I was born, and we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have nylon stockings, we didn’t have plastic. I’m not that old.
BECKY RAPINCHUK: All the latest and greatest things or what you think are the latest and greatest things, I think people are starting to realize that they’re actually not so great. It might clean your floor, but it’s also going to slowly poison you. That’s not what you want.
DEBRA:I should just add here that we were talking earlier about the warning labels and the Poison Control Center and all the things related to toxic chemicals and cleaning products. There’s a difference between what is Poison Control Center is about.
The Poison Control Center and what those labels are that say caution and poison and all of that, those are for what are called acute exposures, which means if your child drank it, or something like that.
But then there’s what’s called chronic exposure, and that’s the day-in, day-out. You didn’t drink the cleaning product, but you’re breathing it all the time.
And when people are cleaning all the time, they’re spreading toxic chemicals throughout their homes, even if your children aren’t cleaning, they’re breathing that and they’re breathing it day-in and day-out.
Actually, very few people relatively are going to drink cleaning products, but all of us are being, unless you’re using a non-toxic cleaner, everybody is being exposed to all these toxic chemicals day-in, day-out. The children are being exposed to them. The babies are being exposed to them. The pregnant mothers are being exposed to them. And everybody is being affected by these cleaning products.
And so this is something my research has shown that cleaning products are among the most toxic exposures you have in your home.
And to me, it’s so easy to change this. It’s so easy. It’s so inexpensive that everyone listening today, if you haven’t already made the switch to non-toxic cleaning products, you can do it very inexpensively.
Just get a copy of Becky’s book. Just go to her website.
Actually, I want to tell everybody that at the top, there’s a link that says “Clean Mama Printables.” Just go there. I’m clicking on “Free Printables.” Where’s the one with the 55 recipes?
BECKY RAPINCHUK:There’s a link on my sidebar to that one as well.
DEBRA:So go where it says the 55 recipes. I’m not finding it at the moment because I’m talking and looking at the same time.
It’s a free printable, and it has 11 recipes for castile soap, how to use castile soap, 11 recipes for how to use baking soda, 11 recipes for—here it is, 55 Simple Cleaning Recipes. I’m clicking on it.
For castile soap, lemons, borax, vinegar and baking soda. And for less than $10, probably, maybe $15, you could buy those five things.
On any Saturday, you could read these free printables, and you could follow the instructions. Everybody could do that.
BECKY RAPINCHUK: If you buy a bag of baking soda at Costco, it’s $4 or $5, it will last you a year or more.
DEBRA:Yes, and even if you just buy a small box of baking soda, it’s a dollar. If you just want to start there. And it’s a dollar for a little bottle of vinegar. And I just bought a box of borax. It was $4.99. Lemons are very inexpensive and castile soap is maybe $5.
So you can get started, and here are all these instructions for free. And if you like what you see, go and get Becky’s book. You can get other things on her website. She’s done a really good job of putting these together.
So we’ve got about a minute left. So is there any final words you’d like to say?
BECKY RAPINCHUK:Thank you so much for having me, and I would encourage anyone that’s looking into creating their own cleaning products to also maybe get a glass bottle or a stronger bottle that will last for a little bit for you to put your spray cleaners in, and maybe put a cute label on it, and own it.
DEBRA:I’ll tell you what I did. I took my vinegar bottle, which is really heavy glass, and I just took the squirter thing. You can even buy them at the hardware store. And it fit exactly into the small vinegar bottle.
As long as I don’t drop it, it’s very easy. That’s what I use to clean my windows.
So we need to go. So thank you so much, Becky, for [inaudible 00:37:28] and being on the show.
BECKY RAPINCHUK:Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
DEBRA:I wish you well with everything that you’re doing. Everybody should go to her website and get this free information. Take a look at what she’s got. CleanMama.net. And you can also go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com to find out more about the upcoming shows and the past shows are all there to listen to in the archives.
Tomorrow, we’re going to have a special treat because there’s a new film coming out. The premiere is on Friday. It’s called
Unacceptable Levels, and it’s all about toxic chemicals. Tomorrow, I’m having the filmmaker on, Ed Brown, and he’s going to tell us all about making the film, and what he learned. And we’re going to learn about toxic chemicals.
Bye.
