Gleaming home, clear conscience – Tips for environmentally friendly spring cleaning

No matter whether you love it or hate it, spring cleaning is a fixed tradition in many households. As soon as the sun make its appearance, it’s time to grab a scrubbing brush and a cloth and get to work! Although cleaning is important and the right thing to do, the products used are often harmful to the environment. Find out how you can balance your desire for cleanliness with environmental protection in a report by Ingo Schleiernick now.

Listen to the report here (mp3 format, 3,47 MB).

When a wide range of cleaning products start piling up at home, it might indicate a high level of motivation, but it doesn’t mean that a home is any cleaner. After all, there are only four cleaning products that are actually needed in any household. Janine Braumann from the German Environment Agency explains which they are.

Janine Braumann: A bathroom cleaner that removes limescale. An all-purpose cleaner and a cream cleaner for the kitchen, and a dishwashing liquid to clean the windows. What you should avoid wherever possible are aggressive cleaning agents with hydrochloric acid or strong alkalis that are labelled as corrosive. And you can also do without disinfectants. These should only be used if recommended by a doctor.

And if you put a bit more effort in when scrubbing, you usually also need less of the cleaning product. After all, as little as possible of these substances should be released into the environment.

Janine Braumann: Detergents and cleaning agents contain substances that can have a negative impact on the environment and human health, both during use and in wastewater. And if these chemicals cannot be completely removed or broken down in wastewater treatment plants, they accumulate in bodies of water, where they can be absorbed by water organisms.

Ecolabels on packaging indicate which products protect the environment.

Janine Braumann: Simply pay attention to environmental labels such as the Blue Angel or the EU Ecolabel. These two labels set particularly high standards. They take the entire life of the product into account and place requirements on the manufacture of raw materials, biodegradability and even the packaging. This makes them particularly trustworthy. For example, the criteria for the Blue Angel ecolabel are developed by us at the German Environment Agency.