Purity Belle Environmental Blog: July 2020

Iron and Velvet Plastic Free Household Cleaner Review

by Cliona Kelliher - Thursday, July 09, 2020

In my quest to reduce plastic for #plasticfreejuly, I decided to try the zero waste sachets from Iron and Velvet, available from thekind.co. I also bought two of the amber glass bottles because I was making my own cleaner at the same time. This is just a quick review of the products and to be clear from the start, this is not a sponsored post, I bought the products at full price.

First up, the bottles seem to be in short supply because I had a wee bit of a wait - they are listed on Amazon also but I preferred to get them from a small supplier and was happy to wait. I had made my own cleaning solution which was a bottle of white vinegar, infused with lemon rinds (just whatever I had, which was maybe two large lemons) and some sprigs of rosemary from the garden.

As you can see, I used one of my Kilner jars for this so that I could just leave for a while.

It was approximately two weeks that the solution was in the jar and once I got the amber bottles, I decanted the fluid into one, removing the rind and rosemary, and tried cleaning with it. My verdict is that it's very effective as a cleaner. It left my kitchen sink super shiny and was as good as any other cleaner I have used, when tested in the bathroom. The one downside is that it does still smell quite strongly of vinegar - you can get the lemon also which offsets it a little, but if you don't like the smell of vinegar, it might be a bit offputting.

So an alternative you might like to try is the zero waste sachets - I thought these were such a brilliant idea. They come in a little cute brown box with 5 sachets for different uses and stickers - so there are antibacterial surface cleaners and a glass and mirror cleaner.

The one I tried was a pink sachet containing antibacterial surface cleaner. You basically just pop the sachet into the bottle of water (instructions are given in the leaflet) and it dissolves quite quickly. The fragrance is Ylang Ylang but it smells weirdly like bubblegum to me - which I quite like! I did wonder about the ingredients but when I checked the website I saw the following:

'Since the end of 2017 we have been developing our products using plant derived, sustainably sourced active ingredients as well as pure essential oils for our fragrances wherever possible meaning up to 70% of our products are fully natural ingredients'

This kind of reassured me, although not a guarantee that these products are completely eco-friendly.

Cleaning wise, again I tested in the bathroom and it worked perfectly, leaving sinks shiny, removing dirt easily and leaving no residue or anything.

The Amber bottles are perfect and I will probably get some more, the spray nozzle works great and they are a good size and very sturdy.

Price wise, the sachets are normally €15.00 but the Kind currently have reductions so they are (at time of writing) €13.50.

The Amber bottles are now €4.50 but normally €5.00

I think that either making your own or using the sachets, are both good options for reducing plastic and waste. So many things come in plastic that it can be very hard to avoid so I am delighted to see manufacturers coming up with other options.

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