I’ve already told you all about Vida Verde, the Brazilian women’s cleaning co-op. Now here’s the perspective of Ruth Alves, the Vida Verde member who is cleaning our house. Ruth was nice enough to answer some questions that I emailed to her. Where are you originally from? What did you do for work there? I [...]

In my last post I told you all about Vida Verde, the co-op of Brazilian house cleaners. They use homemade cleaning supplies, which are far less harmful to respiratory systems than conventional cleaning products. They were kind enough to let me post their recipes, so those of you who aren’t in the Boston area can make them yourselves. These and more are included in Vida Verde’s booklet on how to make and use their cleaning products.

Somehow my search for green cleaning supplies turned into a search for green cleaning services. Okay, I do know how—Sharon told me about Vida Verde. It’s a co-op of Brazilian women who make their own cleaning supplies. It was started because they were poorly paid at their cleaning services or, if they were self-employed, they were forced to buy client lists from more established cleaners—for hundreds of dollars!

Starting in July 2010, residents of Massachusetts and 14 other states won’t have to puzzle over which dish detergents are phosphate-free, because they all will be. The new law exempts detergents intended for commercial dishwashers (a bummer), but detergents for residential use will all contain less than 0.5% phosphates.

Jason was sick this weekend, and while he was shaking down the thermometer, it slipped out of his hand, flew across the room, and broke into a zillion pieces—or so I thought. It was actually four pieces of glass and a zillion tiny beads of mercury.