We spend a lot of time, money and effort on trying to keep our homes, belongings and ourselves immaculately groomed and beautiful, or at least hygienically clean and presentable. The assortment of products available to help us with these endeavours is enormous, even the range within each task is huge. From floor cleaners to laundry products to hair products to nail care – aisle upon aisle in our supermarkets, pharmacies etc. are full of a mind boggling array of options and alternatives, with new ones constantly appearing.
What is the result of all this cleaning, and all this care?
Well, our homes may sparkle and our hair may shine, but how spotless are we really? Cancer rates are soaring, along with rates of asthma, allergies, skin conditions, reproductive problems and nervous disorders. It may surprise you to learn that ALL these are linked to our ever-increasing exposure to many of the synthetic chemicals that make up our “cleaning” and “care” products. We are covering our home surfaces, impregnating our clothing and smothering our skins with toxins every day. We spray them into our air, absorb them through our skin and eat particles of them in the food we prepare in our gleaming kitchens.
And it goes further than this. All this stuff (or whatever is not absorbed into our bodies) goes down our drains to contaminate our groundwater and soils, affecting other species and our own food and water supplies. And all the bottles, tubes and boxes that our cleaning and beautifying products come in? They get chucked onto our rapidly filling landfills, incinerators and dumps to further despoil our environments, our ultimate home. Or we dutifully lug them off to be recycled, which itself uses up precious energy and releases greenhouse gases into our polluted atmosphere.
Can this really be called either cleaning or care? The spots may not be visible on our sparkling chrome, bright crisp clothing or flawless skin, but neither we nor our homes are spotless.
Quite the contrary. Overall, the effect of all our efforts to sanitise and beautify ourselves and our surroundings this way, is really to contaminate and poison them.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and we believe it must not, for we are paying for it with our health and with our lives, and those of others and of our surroundings.
There are many perfectly good, beneficial ways to keep ourselves and our homes truly clean and beautiful, as well as healthy and wholesome, both for ourselves and for the world we live in. And we don’t have to spend a fortune in either money or time to achieve them. People are beginning to be aware of these issues, and there are now more and more commercial alternatives available that use natural, benign ingredients. This is good, of course. But they are often expensive, sometimes not very effective, sometimes not as “environmentally friendly” as they claim, and often still use non-biodegradable packaging, polluting industrial production, and energy-heavy distribution.
There is always another way. This is what this site is about.
Welcome to spotless.
- Read why spotless? for a breakdown of the problems with commercial cleaning and care products and how the spotless approach avoids them.
- See not so spotless to read about what’s in our cleaning and care products, the effects they have, and to find links to more information about specific ingredients and impacts.
- Look at what you’ll need (and why) to learn about the ingredients used in the spotless approach.
- Go to household cleaning or personal care for details of how to tackle a wide range of tasks, spotlessly.
