This works great for homesteaders as well as anyone wanting to go a little more 'green'. It was a simple thought, but one that was completely foreign to me at first. How to reduce the wasteful non-edible items that enter our home. Think about what you spend for plastic trash bags? You purposefully throw them away. The same with paper towels. How about toilet paper? Put it into a bowl of water and flush it away. Why not wipe with dollar bills? Sometimes it almost feels as though that's what I'm throwing into the commode. What about laundry & dish washing soaps? Same thing, spend money on an item that will be excreted from the house with minimal internal impact. There had to be a better, more economical way to accomplish basic and general hygiene without such a horrendous sense of waste.
Simple solutions: inexpensive bar towels instead of paper ones, cloth napkins, cloth wipes for the bathroom (why not?! We use cloth diapers, the toilet cloth just goes in with those. Add a simple sprayer/bidet and you can quickly reduce or even eliminate the need for paper to toss into your commode. Too gross? Then use them only for girls sans defecation. For trash bags I've learned to toss anything organic out the door to the birds, or onto the compost pile. That means that what little is left is dry. No need for plastic bags. Paper bags from the grocers work quite well. Though honestly, no bag at is really needed.
As for cleaning, white vinegar is a great basic household cleaner and fairly inexpensive. For laundry soap I make up a special batch of home-made soap (no frou-frou or superfatting), grate it after it's cured and add some borax and washing soda. You could add fragrance to it as well. This type of basic soap is also very good for using on dishes. I usually just leave a bar flat by the kitchen sink and using the scrub brush, quickly brush up a bit of the soap and scrub each dish. It works well on most foods. I do keep some Dawn on the sink as well, but only for very greasy foods, as it still works better on that.
