Chalk: The Eco Stain Remover

Today I saw another commercial promising to magically remove stains from your laundry.  All you had to do was buy another product just for stains, throw it in with your laundry and laundry detergent and presto bamo! no more stains.  Some women I know adore this idea of a quick fix, but those same people are often the last ones to ask what chemicals are in the product that are strong enough to do that.

Most laundry detergents and softeners are not required by law to disclose the chemicals in each product.  The same goes for most soaps and cleaners marketed for “household” use.  So if you can figure out what powerful chemicals are in those magic stain removers and powerful detergents, it is liable to be things that you would not volunteer to wear on your clothing next to your skin or your child’s skin all day.

So what to do about stains?  Keep a stick of blackboard chalk in your laundry room.  Simply rub a little chalk on a stain before throwing it into the wash.   The chalk powder absorbs grease, leaving the stain easy to remove by the laundry detergent.

And what about all those soaps?  Well, I don’t want to get up on my soap box (pun intended), but soap is soap.  There is no need to have a soap for the floors and a soap for your hands and a soap for your hair and a soap for your face, etc, etc.  Finding a basic liquid and a basic bar soap without chemicals and additives is really all you need.  Companies that sell a soap or cleaner for every little surface in your house and on your body just make money selling more bottles of the same chemical laden crap to you.  In our household, we buy J. R. Watkins “dish soap” for a liquid household cleaner.  We make our own vegan bar soap for hand washing and body washing and we simply use vinegar mixed with club soda for an all purpose surface/floor/window cleaner.  The vinegar we buy from Sams Club is $1.30 / gallon.   It saves a surprising amount of money and leaves us with a peace of mind knowing our house isn’t covered in nasty chemicals.

To get the job done, we have found that Trader Joe’s laundry detergent and Seventh Generation Laundry detergent are paraben-free liquid detergents that are concentrated and work well.  For the dishwasher, we use Mrs. Myers Automatic dishwashing detergent.  We have tried using our household liquid soap, but the dishwasher needs a higher concentration to get things clean.  Selecting a chemical free dishwasher soap is vitally important, because it is inevitable that some soap will stick to your dishes and be ingested as you use them to eat.