If you're new to going toxin- free, I know that it can be a little bit difficult sometimes. Maybe the process is different, maybe the product is different, or maybe it doesn't work quite exactly as you wish it did.

I'm sharing five everyday hacks for using eco-friendly and toxin-free products so you'll actually love them and incorporate them into your daily routines without feeling frustrated that you're wasting money or that they're not working. 

1. You might need to use the product differently. For example, with my favorite laundry detergent, which is a powder, I put it in the drum of my washing machine instead of in that dispenser and it works wonderfully. I know a lot of people think if there's a dispenser then you're supposed to use it. But it doesn't necessarily change how your washer works or the cleanliness of your clothes. I don't know when they started adding these dispensers to washing machines but when I grew up with an old school, top loading washing machine, we just threw it into the drum. We didn't need a special dispenser to put it into the water at a certain time. So even though you may be used to using the dispenser when you're washing your clothes, you don't have to keep doing that, you can try a different way of using the product and it may work better. I recently saw a reel where a woman  just recently learned that you're not supposed to put your dishwasher pods in the dishwasher detergent dispenser, you're just supposed to throw them in your dishwasher. Who knew right? And even though our dishwasher probably has one of those dispensers, it wasn't actually built for pods and so it doesn't work very well for pods. So again, this hack is that you might need to use products differently and just be flexible and realize that just because you're using it in a different way, doesn't mean that it's not going to work.

2. Read the instructions and use the right amount. I know that frequently people think they’re going to need a lot more laundry detergent to really get their clothes clean and it's not true. The potency of the product is created in relation to the amount of water or the amount of the clothes that are going to be in that washing cycle. If you've been throwing in a bunch of extra laundry detergent it's just washing away and you don't need to use all that extra. And you don't want it sitting in your clothes either. So you really want to pay attention to how to use the product and just read the instructions. I always like to warn people that with the laundry detergent that I have in my shop, you don't need as much as you think and a little goes a long way. Same with the scrub that I often sell in my store. It's a really potent scrub and you really just don't need that much. 

3. The sun is a powerful disinfectant. Crazy, right? UV light is a disinfectant and you really only need 30 to 60 minutes to really disinfect whatever it is. So you can disinfect fabric, hard to clean things like maybe your couch cushions that are really hard to get clean. You can throw those in the sun. You want them to be outside in the sun, not through a window. You can take rugs outside and have the sun disinfect your rugs. Super convenient, very free, very healthy, it's just using UV light from the sun. Pretty cool. I was watching a reel the other day and they said that they took their pickle jars outside and the sun took away the smell from their pickle jars. How crazy is that? So it's taking a jar glass jar that had an extra smell in it. Sometimes tomatoes also leave a strong smell in your jars but you can leave them outside and disinfect them and they're not going to have that smell and then you can reuse that jar for another purpose. Pretty cool.

4. Get creative. So, like I said earlier with the washing detergent, sometimes it's just a little bit different to use an eco-friendly product. For example, using a bar dish soap. If you've never used a bar dish soap, sometimes if you add too much water, which happens a lot in my house, then it gets kind of gooey and scummy. Which makes sense, right? It's a bar soap that's breaking down because the water is touching it. By the way, basically that's what basic liquid dish soap is. It's soap mixed with water. So it makes sense that a bar soap, if it gets too much water on it, it's going to start breaking down and it's not very attractive. So what I love to do is I like to get creative in situations like this where I'm like, what am I gonna do with this gross grimy soap, it doesn't look very attractive on my counter. So I got creative and I threw that soap bar in my favorite coffee mug. And now it sits on top of my counter. It looks cute. No one can see if the soap is slimy and gross. And it fits perfectly. Great solution.

5. Your everyday home products might do more than you think. So vinegar, baking soda, oxygen, brightener and even rubbing alcohol, they all have a lot of great purposes in the home. For example, alcohol. I talked to Patrick Richardson, the author of Laundry Love: finding Joy in a Common Chore, in episode number 113 and he talked all about how you can use alcohol to get smells out of fabrics. Who knew? I bet putting them in the sun would be really helpful too. So these everyday products like vinegar or baking soda, they really have a second life in cleaning. And if you search the internet, you can find all sorts of tips. Did you know that you can use rubbing alcohol to do streak free cleaning on your stainless steel appliances? It also will clean your dry erase boards that haven't gotten completely clean, you can remove stickers with it. You can even get dry erase marker out of fabrics. It's pretty incredible. 

I have pulled together and curated a store with all of my favorite products. The reason why I did this was because people came to me all the time asking for the names of the products that I used with my family in my own home. I found that the internet and shopping can be so overwhelming that I wanted to create a simple one stop shop for you. You will find products that I use in my own home that live up to my ridiculously high safety and eco-friendly standards. Check it out at www.detox.design/thebox

Thanks for helping me make this planet happier and healthier one step at a time.