Yes, eco-friendly cleaning products are better for your health — especially if you’ve got allergies or asthma. And yes, green cleaning products are better for the environment, since “conventional” cleaners put unnecessary bleach, petrochemicals, and other toxic stuff into our water.

But with the economy the way it is right now, eco-friendly cleaning products are fast gaining popularity for a totally different reason: They’re really, really cheap.

Well, to be more specific, green cleaners are really really cheap if you make them yourself. And luckily, concocting household cleaners is a simple task. Here’s how to save money while keeping your house green and clean, going from easy to more challenging steps:

1. Start with the windows. If you’ve got some white vinegar in the house, you should never buy window cleaner again. My friend Summer cleaned her windows with “a bucket 1/4 of the way full of water, a few glugs of white vinegar, a rag, and some newspapers” then wrote a post with an illustrated photo to show just how easy the cleaning task was.

2. Ease in with the helper kits. To help you transition into making your own cleaning supplies, a number of companies have put together helper kits that do most of the work for you:

>> The Eco-Me Home Kit (right; $26) gives you a bottle of essential oil, empty bottles and jars, cleansing cloths and brushes — plus instructions to help you mix the essential oil with other ingredients you have laying around the house — vinegar, water and baking soda — to create an all-purpose cleaner, a wood polish cleaner and a scrub cleanser.

>> Shaklee’s Basic H2 Organic Super Cleaning Concentrate ($12.15) is a bottle of concentrated cleaner that you can mix with water in different proportions to make an all-purpose cleaner, degreaser, or window cleaner (though using method #1′s gonna be cheaper and just as simple). You can even get special empty spray bottles to mix the ingredients in — though why people would opt to pay $8.10 for empty plastic bottles is beyond me. I suggest just reusing the bottles from your old cleaners.

>> Arm & Hammer Essentials cleaners require the least mixing work. The multi-surface cleaner, degreaser, and window cleaner (again, see #1) are all basically empty bottles with a smaller concentrate bottle attached. Your task’s simply emptying the small bottle into a bigger one before adding water. And after your first buy, you can simply buy the small concentrate refill bottles, reducing plastic waste while saving money.

3. Go all in and make an entire non-toxic cleaning kit. If, while reading #2, you wondered why anyone would pay $26 for a kit that basically tells you to mix up what you got at home, then I guess you’re the type who doesn’t need much eco-cleaning hand-holding. All you need are recipes! And thanks to Annie B. Bond at Care2′s popular “How to Make a Non-Toxic Cleaning Kit” post, many many environmentalists have been able to concoct everything from oven cleaner to furniture polish using just five simple ingredients: baking soda, washing soda, white distilled vinegar, liquid soap or detergent, and tea tree oil.

Aside from this tea tree oil stuff which is a tad more expensive and more difficult to find (Eco-Me sells Home Blend Oil for $10), the rest of the ingredients are cheap, everyday household products. So join the clean green movement — and at the very least, never waste your hard-earned money on window cleaner again.

Top photo by jilldoughtie; bottom photo courtesy Eco-Me

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