Baking Soda - The Everyday Miracle

We Love Baking Soda

In Green Home Eco-Cleaning company, baking soda is one of our most favourite cleaning product ingredients, alongside with white vinegar, Castile soap, and variety of pure essential oils. It is all natural, free of toxins and chemicals and does wonders when used for cleaning! One thing for sure, there is not a single day of cleaning for us, without the almighty help of baking soda.

Baking Soda Miracle

Baking soda has the power to freshen and clean seemingly countless spots in your home. It is a super-effective, but gentle abrasive and is a great natural deodorizer. Baking soda reacts with vinegar. The acid-base reaction is also the reason baking soda and vinegar are cleaning partners. The baking soda and vinegar volcano might be a science-fair classic, but that same explosive chemical reaction can do wonders in your kitchen or bathroom.

What is Baking Soda?

Baking soda is a mined mineral that is extracted from mother earth in the form of minerals nahcolite and trona, which are refined into soda ash (a.k.a. calcium carbonate), then turned into baking soda (a.k.a. sodium bicarbonate), among other things. Most of it comes from the United States, which contains the world’s largest trona deposit. There is no risk of depletion anytime soon:

“According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Wyoming alone contains 56 million tons of pure layered trona, plus 47 billion more tons mixed with other minerals. We are only tapping trona at the rate of 15 million tons per year; the Wyoming Mining Association estimates that we have enough on hand to last more than 2,000 years.”

Nahcolite, naturally occurring sodium bicarbonate, is often found in evaporated lake basins:

“Nahcolite exists in large quantities in the central salt body of Searles Lake, California, and as concentrations up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) thick in oil shale deposits in Colorado, where it is commercially mined. It also has been mined in Botswana and Kenya, and there are sizable deposits in Uganda, Turkey, and Mexico.”

Baking Soda Uses

Baking soda is known for its fantastic deodorizing, whitening, brightening, cleaning, bactericidal and gentle scrubbing abilities. Due to its powder form, it's also great for absorbing grease and spills. When it is used as a cleaner in paste form or dry on a damp sponge, its crystalline structure provides a gentle abrasion that helps to remove dirt without scratching sensitive surfaces. Its mild alkalinity works to turn up fatty acids contained in dirt and grease into a form of soap that can be dissolved in water and rinsed easily. 

Very alkaline with a high pH, baking soda is one of the top eco-friendly cleaning ingredients, and it is used in many green cleaning products. You can find it in laundry detergents, dishwashing soaps, mould control products, carpet fresheners and cleaners, automatic dishwasher detergents, air fresheners, toilet bowl cleaners, floor cleaners, all-purpose cleaners, and stain removers.