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Out, out damned spot! Solution wizard Reena Nerbas makes home life easier – and greener

Has something like Tilex sent you coughing and choking to open a window while you were cleaning your shower? How about those detergents that make the skin on your hands feel like it shrunk three sizes after you’ve washed dishes?

If you’ve ever suffered the above or had your own unique reaction while cleaning something basic around your house, you’ll be super glad that Reena Nerbas didn’t turn into a fashion buyer or a children’s book author like she set out to be.

Instead, Reena has become a cool, contemporary Canadian guru of household solutions — a post post-modern version of those bastions of handy home tips, like Heloise and Penny Wise, with a zingy, down-to-earth flair.

Reena has parlayed common sense and curiosity with her degree in human ecology (that’s the study of how people interact with their environment and nature; it used to be called home economics) to become the author of best sellers Household Solutions 1 with Substitutions and Household Solutions 2 with Kitchen Secrets ; a regular guest on CBC Radio One (catch her locally on Mark Forsythe’s B.C. Almanac) and CTV’s Canada AM; and a national newspaper columnist.

All of her work is based on a common thread: “I’m trying to get people to reduce chemicals in their homes more and more and to use less toxic products in other ways. I call them ‘household superstars’,” she says from her home in a small town outside of Winnipeg, where she lives with her husband and four children — excellent generators of challenges to test tips on.

“For example, you have peanut butter. Peanut butter is not just for putting on sandwiches — you can fix your music CDs with peanut butter. You can take gum out of hair with peanut butter. You can remove labels from jars with peanut butter. There are multiple uses for multiple products in the home. You don’t always have to run out to the store and buy these hugely expensive commercial products that have not been tested for safety.”

Note the last phrase. Canada is way behind Europe and even the U.S. when it comes to standards for household chemicals. There are more than 75,000 untested chemicals in products on store shelves in Canada, and they don’t have any standards for usage. Even scarier, manufacturers then take these untested chemicals and combine them with each other or with other chemicals, so we really don’t know what the effects are.

“Because of an act during the Industrial Revolution called the Trade Secrets Act, companies don’t need to tell you what’s in the products they’re selling,” says Reena. “Except for the corrosive warnings on them, they don’t need to tell you. So we are scrubbing and cleaning our homes with all these toxic chemicals and not even realizing what they are.”

Many people also don’t realize they can be absorbed through skin, so they don’t wear rubber gloves. Then there are those of us who know better but are too lazy to get the gloves out. Never mind the problem of breathing in chemical vapours, all in the name of cleanliness.

Decades of advertising, social conventions and old habits have lured us into this chemical kingdom. Now doctors caution that we are getting too clean, begging us to stop using anti-bacterial soaps because they encourage super-bugs and proving that the epidemic of asthma is, in part, due to hyper-cleaning.

But the great thing about Reena’s approach to household solutions is that she’s practical, recognizing that we do live in a world that contains chemicals, and that some of them can be helpful in unintended applications.

“I’m not an extremist who says never use dishwasher detergent,” she says. “But I do add baking soda and borax to my dishwasher detergent so that it uses less bleach and lasts longer. So you can really reduce your use of chemicals.”

Not only is it better for all of us and the environment, there’s something enormously satisfying about generating household solutions — for cleaners, food substitutes or other uses — from things that are inexpensive, have met FDA standards and you’ve already got around your house. One such superstar is borax, which cleans by converting some water molecules to hydrogen peroxide.

Plus if you just need a tablespoon of something, isn’t it better if that something is peanut butter or vinegar? That way you won’t be stuck with a whole container of noxious cleaner that sits under your sink for ages until you figure out how to dispose of it properly or, more likely, finally toss it in the landfill, where it ends up in the ecosystem.

I’ve just used Reena’s tip for getting hand cream out of a favourite T-shirt (page 41 of Household Solutions 1 ) by dabbing on some dish detergent before I washed it (in BioVert laundry soap). If you’re vegan, you can use flax as a substitute for eggs in baking. You can clean the copper bottoms of your pots with ketchup (just leave it sit for a while to work) and you can gently peel band-aids off your toddler’s skin if you first soak the band-aid in baby oil.

Many of Reena’s tips come from readers and listeners, with, surprisingly, about half of them coming from men, and almost all of them coming from people over 30 (young people just aren’t interested). The rest are her own discoveries, applying her knowledge of science and chemistry, like this tip for whitening yellowed Corelle dishes that combines two weak acids and heightens their effect with heat: Put the yellowed dishes in a big pot with three cups of vinegar and four cups of water, add some citric acid, which you can get from the pharmacy, boil them for five minutes, and they’ll look like new.

Don’t worry about buying citric acid. It’s naturally found in food and if you have some left over, Reena says you can add it to your dishwasher dispenser to magically remove mild etching from your glassware. Besides, who knows what else you’ll discover to do with it.

For more tips from Reena Nerbas, including her famous recipe to remove “impossible” carpet stains, or to order her books, go to www.householdsolutions.org/

 

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who buys 20 Mule Team Borax just to see the cute icon of 20 mule teams.