If you take a look under the kitchen sink in the average UK home, you will find a small arsenal of cleaning products designed to bleach, kill germs, remove limescale, tackle grease, get your clothes whiter than white and your dishes sparklingly clean. Businesses are no different – we all need to clean our places of work. But taking a closer look at the labels reveals that most of these consist of a cocktail of chemicals that are derived from petrochemicals, a depleting resource that is not renewable. In addition, most of these chemicals do not biodegrade, so they can build up in the environment and cause harm to animals and humans.

We started to make tentative changes to the cleaning products we use, switching to Ecover for a couple of items. However, I am now looking at switching all our cleaning products over to biodegradable ones as standard.

Ecover do an extensive range of environmentally friendly products that are available in supermarkets or by mail order. For businesses, there is also a list of wholesalers that stock large quantities of each product.

Bio-D also make various cleaning products, all 100 % biodegradable and can be purchased from the places listed on this page.

Sonett have a large range of products, again, all biodegradable but they are a little more expensive than Ecover and Bio-D. They can only be purchased online via this online shop.

As far as we can tell, biodegradable cleaning agents work just as effectively as normal cleaning products and the range that is now available means that there’s no reason not to make the switch. Another small step to becoming a sustainable business, but an important one I think.