Saturday, February 11th, 2012

Eco Store review! Thumbs UP!

We need to keep the message of Earth Day going all year so I’m going to try be more GREEN on the blog and in real life. Eco Store USA is a company that I am very excited to help spread the word about! Eco Store was founded in New Zealand and has branched out to the USA now to provide Baby Care, Bath & Body, Hair Care, Household and Pet Care products with “NO NASTY CHEMICALS”! They let me choose two of their products for free to review and I chose the Front Loader Laundry Powder and the Auto Dish Powder. I am now a big fan of these products and here are some of the reasons why:

I have been trying to do away with “normal” harmfull cleaning products for awhile, especially since we have 4 young kids.
The dish powder comes in a bottle with a CHILD PROOF CAP! This is very helpful with a 1 1/2 year old monkey in the house. Jillian can reach things near the edge of the counter and will go get a chair if she sees something she can’t reach.
Maybe its just me but I have gotten several boxes of dish powder soaked over the years when there is a spill on the counter or a leak under the sink and I am really happy to not have to worry about that with a recyclable plastic bottle.
Both products are SUPER CONCENTRATED! Just a tablespoon of dish powder (I use one cap full) is all you use so the bottle goes a long way. I have tried an eco-friendly brand at the grocery store but I have to use a lot of it and the box goes really quickly.
My dishes and laundry are clean
The clothes smell fresh but not perfumey
Eco Store ships their products safely in completely recyclable packaging including packing peanuts made out of soy. They just dissolve in water! However its a great bonus art material for the kids, you just give them a little bowl of water to dip the end of the peanut and it will stick to another peanut and bond very quickly. My kids made animals and people mostly and I gave them markers to draw faces on, I definitely recommend trying it out! (The only problem was that our dog Casey apparently likes the taste of soy packing peanuts and ate some of the kids creations, we have a weird dog I guess!)
NO HORRIBLE chemical TASTE in my silicone bake ware and bowls. Okay I am going to go into a rant here and I am not a fan of rants or complaining on the blog BUT I feel very strongly about this so I am making an exception! If you have silicone products (and some other plastics) and use them with the big name brand in the green box it is a huge recipe for disaster. I have ruined several batches of muffins and lots of leftover foods when that name brand tainted my silicone bake ware and the plastic lids to my Pyrex bowls. I wrote to the company and told them what happened and they made some lame excuses and sent me some free coupons (which I did NOT want and gave away). I thought maybe my older dishwasher could have been partially to blame but then last month my mom brought over a cake that she made in her silicone cake pans and I had to throw out the whole cake because it was completely “cask-aid” flavored despite that she has a brand new dishwasher. Luckily washing the silicone a few times with eco-friendly dish powder got the chemical taste out. I will never use any brand of regular dish powder EVER again, the thought of it totally scares me!
and most importantly: “no nasty chemicals” gives me peace of mind