12 cleaner alternatives to things you use every day
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A lot of our lives is spent maintaining.
Maintaining our home, ourselves, and our possessions to ensure they’re all clean, long-lasting, and presentable takes up a lot of our time. But the irony is that many of the regular exercises we perform are far less efficient (and actually kind of gross) than they really should be.
It makes you ask yourself whether you're performing the action in order to succeed in a goal, or simply to perform the action alone. If you want to clean your dishes, but you know that the sponge sitting in its own warm, damp ecosystem is likely pretty gross, why do you continue to rub that same thing all over your utensils and consider the job done?
We use the same iconic and unexamined products, like traditional kitchen sponges and toothbrushes, to clean our homes and ourselves daily without considering the fact that they themselves may not be clean — making our own mundane practices more fruitless (and therefore more frequent) than they ought to be in 2017. You actually don't have to spend so much time maintaining in order to properly maintain yourself and your home.
You just need better products.
If you actually want to lead a cleaner life, have clearer skin, or be able to avoid the ominous mildew smell from creeping into your bathroom, you might want to consider upgrading to things that do what you want them to do, and do it better.
Below are 12 cleaner alternatives and cleaning tools for things you use daily:
Toothbrushes
Your mouth and your bathroom are both really dirty places. So it doesn't make much sense to stick a toothbrush into your mouth to clean it, brush around a bit, and then stick it back in your cupboard or out in the open in your bathroom to breed bacteria, until the next time you stick it in your mouth to clean it.
So here's a more sanitary option: Boie toothbrushes are made of a gentle rubber-like material that cleans your mouth better and also have silver embedded in the bristles to kill bacteria on contact. Read the full review of one here.
Some researchers advise storing your toothbrush in a separate room altogether, so nothing gross lands on your brush. And though grabbing a toothbrush cover will keep the brush free from some things, it creates the perfect, moist, closed environment for bacteria to grow.
Boie USA Antimicrobial Toothbrush, $12
Kitchen sponges
Your kitchen sponge is likely dirtier than your toilet. Similar to toothbrush covers that create a great environment for bacteria, common household sponges do much the same; they're moist, warm, and only slightly porous. Essentially, they're great breeding grounds for gross microbes.
Some researchers suggest replacing them weekly if you mean to keep the sanitary practice of cleaning your dishes (so you can eat off them) actually sanitary.
This antimicrobial scrubber is made out of silicone so it's 100% resistant to things like mold and mildew. Its pores are purposefully large so it doesn't retain moisture and debris can't accumulate. And as a bonus, it's guaranteed to resist bacteria odors for at least three months. Plus, you get three sponges for under $10.
Read more about it here.
Antimicrobial Silicone Scrubber by Peachy Clean, 3 Pack, $9.95
Mattresses
It's no surprise with how much of our lives that we spend in bed that we might track in some of our less than desirable grungies into that hallowed ground with us.
The only viable solution is more stalling than solving; you could grab a mattress protector, but that barrier isn't entirely impervious either. So PangeaBed started making mattresses that are infused with copper, a natural antimicrobial material that's been used to keep things bacteria-free since ancient civilizations. Using copper in bedding is an ingenious way to repurpose something common in a newly resourceful way. And since copper is also a great thermal conductor, these mattresses will also keep you cooler.
Read more here.
PangeaBed's Copper Mattress is available in the following sizes: twin ($645), twin XL ($745), full ($825), queen ($895), king ($1,045), California king ($1,045).
It's available on PangeaBed and here on Amazon.
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