Cleaning Safely, with Grandma's Ingredients

From today's New York Times:

The women in Laura Gosa’s kitchen in Jersey City fell to, blending the ingredients spread out on her counters like so many blasts from Grandma’s preindustrial past: baking soda, borax, Castile soap, lemon oil, vinegar, glycerin and other staples of the all-natural armamentarium.

These women weren’t interested in buying green products; this was strictly a make-your-own approach. It was one of more than 100 such parties held since late March in various parts of the country by Women’s Voices for the Earth, an environmental group based in Missoula, Mont., that just began the program and has another 100 parties planned. The group made headlines last year with a report that common household cleaners contained obscure chemicals — mostly in small amounts as fragrances or surfactants — that it considered unsafe.

While it is deeply serious about persuading people to consider alternatives to chemical-laden cleaning products, the parties are not merely dutiful. At another recent one in the Wall Street conference room of Divine Capital Markets, a brokerage firm, the firm’s founder, Danielle F. Hughes, served “Windex martinis,” mixed from Ketel One vodka and blue Gatorade.

Ms. Hughes said she is wary of detergents and cleaning products because she thinks they triggered her past attacks of asthma and eczema.

But she is hardly suspicious of everything made by conglomerates.

“Heck, I’m in the stock market, I don’t want everybody to stop buying everything,” she said. “But we need to lobby companies to say, Hey, tell us what’s in it.”

The rest of the story is on the New York Times website.