10 Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products for a Sustainable Home

Want a greener way to spruce up your place or help you tackle spring cleaning? These 10 suppliers of sustainable cleaning products keep your home, health, and the environment spic and span.

Having a dazzling home that looks, smells, and feels clean without harming you, your pets, or the environment shouldn’t be too much to ask. And thankfully, with the green cleaning industry on the rise, it isn’t!

While almost any off-the-shelf household cleaner at your favorite big-box store will get the job done, many are fraught with chemicals that pose risks to the natural environment and even your health. This has spurred many eco-conscious people to seek more thoughtful options or even make their own upholstery cleaner, jewelry cleaner, and many other DIY cleaning solutions.

Now a variety of commercial companies are accepting the trend and offering eco-friendly household cleaners that keep your home and your conscience clean—including our own popular line of bio-degradable, paraben-free, vegan-friendly, and cruelty-free household and bathroom cleaners at Public Goods.

But how do you know which products are truly non-toxic and which are blowing smog and mirrors? In this article, we’ll take a look at our top 10 brands for sustainable cleaning products that truly provide a safe and effective clean.

How to Shop Sustainable Cleaning Products

When it comes to shopping for eco-friendly cleaning products, it can be unnecessarily difficult to do what is right for your health and the environment. Words like green and eco-friendly are slapped on product packaging, labeling, or marketing lingo without government regulation—making this typically trusted vocabulary all but useless for shoppers to rely on.

The practice of overusing these words to invoke the idea of eco-friendliness without proper context or supported claims is known as greenwashing. So how do you avoid falling for greenwashed products and shop for eco-conscious cleaning solutions you’ll love? Follow our tips below.

Familiarize yourself with common chemicals. Knowledge is your best tool for seeking out sustainable cleaning products. The Environmental Protection Agency provides actionable data on the chemicals used in consumer products and their potential risks.

Heed product warnings. Cleaning companies in the U.S. aren’t required to disclose ingredients on product labels, meaning some harmful chemicals are sure to be missing from the packaging. To gauge whether the product still presents a risk to you or the environment, look for words like warning, caution, or corrosive. These are all indicators that the cleaner isn’t so eco-friendly after all.

Start with our recommendations below. Still not sure where to start? We listed our favorite brands for eco-friendly cleaning products to help liven up your home without putting a damper on your health, family, pets, or environment.

Our Picks: Top 10 Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products

Regardless of the cleaning task at hand, it’s important to have a product you know you can trust to deliver a spotless shine without harming the environment or your health. We put together the following list of 10 brands that have made a positive impact with effective yet sustainable products.

1. Public Goods

At Public Goods, it is our mission to make sustainable, non-toxic cleaning products an easy and accessible choice for everyone. We offer a wide range of eco-friendly goods at affordable prices so no one has to choose between cleaning their home or protecting the world we all share. 

We take care to ensure all of our sustainable cleaning products are vegan-friendly, bio-degradable, and eco-conscious. That means they’re free of unnatural additives, foaming or water softening agents, synthetic fragrance, phthalates, parabens, and more. Oh, and they’re absolutely not tested on animals.

To provide a cohesive suite of eco-friendly household supplies, we go beyond sustainable dish soap, hand soap, glass cleaner, and more. Our biodegradable tree-free paper towels are perfect for drying hands, blotting up spills, or applying your favorite product to any surface. Or, reach for a walnut-based scrubbing sponge and let loose on tough stains.

If you’re worried about not only what your products are made of but also what packaging they come in—so are we. At Public Goods, our packaging is always recyclable and even compostable whenever possible.

2. Puracy

Pink Himalayan sea salt. Sustainable coconuts. Pure olive oil. Essential oils. We don’t recommend you eat eco-friendly cleaning products from Puracy (please don’t), but we don’t blame you if you just considered it for a split-second. This company fills reusable glass bottles with biodegradable cleaning formulas and ships products to customers through a short logistics chain.

Like Public Goods, Puracy is doing its part to sustain our environment through eco-friendly initiatives associated with its products. While we plant a tree for every new member, Puracy pays to offset carbon for net-zero shipping. They offset four tons of CO2 each month, which is a commendable effort we can get behind.

3. Seventh Generation

Plants and minerals are the magic ingredients in Seventh Generation’s range of eco-friendly cleaning products. With more than 30 years of experience in the industry, it’s a brand that can back up its clout with honest, green cleaning power. You won’t find unnecessary ingredients like fragrance and dyes in its products—just essential oils, botanical extracts, and other plant-based agents to keep your conscience clear.

4. Pur Home

We love supporting minority-owned businesses, and Pur Home is a black-owned company with a mission to provide sustainable household cleaning products for the kitchen, laundry room, and bathroom. Its owners take people, environment, community, and sustainability to heart—delivering non-toxic, sulfate-free, plant-based, and biodegradable products that make your home squeaky clean!

5. The Laundress 

As the name implies, The Laundress is all about conscious fabric care with eco-friendly laundry detergents that take care of the environment, not just your clothes. The owners are self-dubbed soap mavens who combined their knowledge, passion, and science to create a line of plant-based, highly effective laundry and home cleaning products.

The Laundress is known mostly for naturally great-smelling scents, comprehensive kits for fabric care, and scientifically formulated solutions to make your springtime knits luxuriously soft.

6. Honest Company

Founded by actress and celebrity Jessica Alba, the Honest Company has as much star power as it has cleaning power going for it. Among a wide variety of sustainable cleaning products, the company prides itself on refillable containers to reduce plastic waste.

While the bottles are plastic, their quality construction means you can use them again and again without sending them to the landfill. Each refill is encased in a concentrated cleaning pod wrapper that dissolves quickly in cold water. 

7. Reel

If you’re loving our tree-free products from tissues to paper towels, Reel is another brand that’s doing tree-free right. Their toilet paper is made from bamboo so you can make a difference each time you use the bathroom. Convenient subscription options let you choose how often you want to receive a shipment (in plastic-free packaging!), and each purchase goes toward a greater good.

That’s because Reel gives back for every roll sold. Toilets are costly, wasteful, and inaccessible to billions of people. Reel hopes to alleviate this global issue by partnering with SOIL, an organization that provides toilets to the underprivileged and transforms waste into useful resources in Haiti.

8. Cleancult

What do paper-based cartons and refillable glass bottles have in common? No plastic! While refillable glass (and even plastic) is arguably more favorable to our environment than cutting down trees, Cleancult’s commitment to cut down on disposable plastic is more than admirable. Scientists estimate there are eight million metric tons of plastic in our oceans. With favorites like eco-friendly foaming hand soap, natural stain remover, and carbon-neutral refills, what’s not to love?

9. Dropps

Dropps is all about using the power of nature against dirt and grime on your clothes, dishes, and more. They’re mostly known for their laundry and dish detergent pods, which use mineral-based ingredients and hold EPA’s Safer Choice certification. They also wage war against plastic, using very basic packaging and a dissolvable film around the pods themselves.

We love that they share our views on eradicating toxic pollution, plastic waste, and animal cruelty. Look out for compostable packaging, carbon-neutral shipping, and local manufacturing here in the U.S.

10. Veles

You’ve probably never heard that one person’s trash is another person’s household cleaner, but that’s exactly the concept behind Veles. Vigorously tested on all manners of messes, Veles’ cleaner is not only proven to remove grease and grime from a variety of surfaces—it’s made from 97 percent food waste. And the other three percent is essential oils!

This keeps the product’s ingredient list as clean as your countertops will be while simultaneously tackling a massive environmental issue: up to 40 percent of food is wasted in the United States. We think this is a great way to help reduce the environmental, economic, and societal impact of wasted food.

Shop Sustainably at Public Goods

Want an easy, affordable, and healthy way to keep your home clean and green? Shop our sustainable cleaning products, zero waste goods, and our ever-popular tree-free paper products. At Public Goods, we make it our mission to take care of our customers as well as our planet by using biodegradable packaging over single-use plastics and offsetting carbon by planting a tree for every order.