One of my new year’s traditions is giving my home a good clean. So I thought it’d be appropriate to review a cleaning product from Blueland.
A More Planet-Friendly Company
Blueland is an sustainably-minded cleaning products company that sources environmentally-responsible ingredients and eschews single-use plastic.
The founder, Sarah Paiji Yoo, says she began thinking about ways to cut down on single-use plastic when she became a new mom. “I was horrified to learn that all the plastic I was throwing away was contaminating our water supply and generating hundreds of microplastics in the water and food I was feeding my baby.”
Blueland is a B-Corp and offsets its carbon usage. When it comes to sustainability, Blueland has certifications to back them up. They are Cradle to Cradle Certified, Climate Neutral Certified, and EWG verified (among others). EWG stands for Environmental Working Group and they maintain databases that I use to check cosmetics and cleaning supplies for unsafe ingredients. Do note that only two of Blueland’s products meet EWG’s standards for verification at this time: the fragrance-free laundry tablets and dishwasher tablets.
I decided to give Blueland a try when I recently ran out of the Method bathroom cleaner I usually use. Blueland makes concentrated tablets that you add water to. This makes sense to me. No sense in shipping water around! This also means you can just use the same spray bottle repeatedly instead of getting a new one each time.
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How Well Does Blueland’s Bathroom Cleaner Clean?
Blueland Bathroom Cleaner. I’m re-using my own bottle here. Starter kit with 3 tablets $18.00, refill pack: 3 for $6.50, 6 for $15, or 12 for $27
Blueland sells a bathroom starter kit that includes an initial spray bottle. But I decided to forgo their bottle since I can just reuse the empty Method bottle I already had. The tablets come individually packaged in a small compostable pouch and shipped in a recyclable padded paper envelope. Each tablet is meant to be dissolved in 24 ounces of water. The Method bottle is 28 ounces, so I guesstimated and didn’t fill it up all the way.
Drop the tablet, let it fizz, and in a few minutes you’re ready to clean.
The Method and Blueland bathroom cleaners are both eucalyptus-scented. The first thing I noticed was that Blueland wasn’t as fragrant as the Method bathroom cleaner. The scent is faint. But I didn’t mind at all. I prefer the milder scent, actually.
I don’t know enough about chemicals to comment on the ingredients, but you can find a full list of ingredients for each product on Blueland’s website. This cleaner does contain sodium lauryl sulfate (so does the Method cleaner), a surfactant that’s common in personal care items too. Sodium lauryl sulfate can irritate the skin, but isn’t considered dangerous unless it’s in contact with the skin for a long period of time. Still, if you have sensitive skin or skin conditions, you might want to avoid it.
So, how well does it work? I’ve tried it on my bathroom counter and sink and on the soap scum in my bathtub. For light maintenance (like wiping down the bathroom counter and sink), it works just fine. With soap scum in my bathtub, I do need to give it a good scrub. I use my Full Circle grout and tile brush or a scouring pad for that. (Read my review of Full Circle products.) It does a comparable job to the Method cleaner.
Overall, the cleaner works as expected and I have no complaints. As to tough mildew and mold (I have a particularly mold-prone bathroom), I still need to deploy the admittedly not-environmentally-friendly Tilex for that.
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Using refill tablets instead of a bottled product makes sense beyond the environmental aspect. It’s kinder on the pocketbook too. Each refill is only $2.25 to $2.50 depending on how many you buy at once. Sufficiently impressed by Blueland, I’ll be trying out their other offerings as I use up my current stash of cleaning products. I’m glad to support a company that’s creating more eco-friendly products, and one that’s Asian American-owned too. You can buy Blueland products directly from their website or from their Amazon storefront.
Related to the latter, I wanted to share this essay by Yoo about being Asian American in these pandemic times. Like many Asian Americans, she experienced racism and China-bashing during the pandemic — including from her own customers! You’d think that consumers who value the environment would also be anti-racist, but depressingly, that is not so.
