What's eutrophication?

Hi, girls!

As many of you, I am also a full-time mum and a housewife. Let’s admit – we spend enormous amount of time in our kitchens. While cleaning, cooking, washing and drying, you think about your everyday duties, your kids, you imagine what will happen in the next episode of your favorite soap opera or just simply dream. Agatha Christie acknowledged that she has created her best-selling novels while washing the dishes.

While looking at soap bubbles in the sink, have you ever thought about the influence you make on our environment?

Everyday while our homes become cleaner, our planet becomes more and more polluted. Not only plants and fabrics are to blame, but also usual households cause irreversible damages to the environment.

Foremost bad guys in this battle are the phosphates (salts and esters of phosphoric acids). They are main ingredients of most of our household chemicals. And it goes like this: you wash the clothes or do the dishes, phosphates drain with sewage water and later get into water reservoirs. They provoke rapid growth of blue and bright green algae – yes, those things make water “bloom” and in the same time they suffocate local fauna.

These algae worsen the quality of the water; it starts smelling, tasting bad and is filled with toxins. For example, cyanobacterium activates the growth of cancer cells. The victims are we all: fishes, amphibias and humans. Such destructive process is called eutrophication.

Eutrophication (Greek: eutrophia—healthy, adequate nutrition, development; German: Eutrophie) or more precisely hypertrophication, is the ecosystem response to the addition of artificial or natural substances, such as nitrates and phosphates, through fertilizers or sewage, to an aquatic system. (Source: WikiPedia)

We all want what’s best for our families, for our kids. So why not using more organic cleaning means?

I remember my mum and grandma have washed the windows with water and vinegar, and then rubbed the glass with paper, so it began to sparkle.

I can’t say, I will stop using all my home detergents. But I promise – I will keep trying and searching for more biological substitutes.

What do you think, girls?

Tip: check “Green Living” page at goodhousekeeping.com

You can find many articles on this topic, like “Create an Eco-Friendly Kitchen

100 Tips for a Greener Home, etc.

yours A.