The following article was written by Michael Kelly of GIY Ireland, and it highlights the need to be more conscious of what cleaning products are used in our environments. We are hoping to stock Lillis products soon in the (tiny) shop. I keep sticking in “tiny” or “little” or “small” all the time because I am afraid that if someone visits here expecting a huge food emporium they will be sorely disappointed! However just because it is little it doesn’t mean it is lacking in a big heart…I want to let everyone taste amazing fresh food, that is local, and that is in a shop that is not full of disinteresed staff who don’t have a clue about the products.

Tasteworks Farm Shop is very very small but full of great stuff! Lillis Eco Clean will soon be on the shelves, well somewhere anyway…Lillis website is fun not all lecturing and scolding like some very worthy product websites are…too worthy for their own good in my opinion. Good for the environment does not have to mean serious and humourless…see http://www.lillysecoluv.com. Read on for Michael Kelly’s piece…

“Shopping at my local supermarket recently I was drawn to some quirky looking cleaning products, called Lilly’s Eco Clean. I say quirky because the packaging is brightly coloured with lots of funky eco slogans (think Innocent Smoothies). Lilly’s washing up liquid is made from a blend of detergents derived from coconut oil, citric acid, sodium chloride, vegetable glycerine and lemon oil. It is free from nasty phosphates, EDTA, enzymes, chlorine bleaches, synthetic perfumes, formaldehyde, synthetic glycerines and dyes.

The owner of the company, 36 year old Lilli Klint from Finland was a cabinet maker but established her own contract cleaning business in Wicklow about four years ago. She had built up a successful business when she started to get very ill indeed. Initially she dismissed the symptoms – chronic sinusitis, uncontrollable sneezing and a rash – as hay fever but when it didn’t ease up after four miserable months of “eating antihistamines”, she started to wonder if the cleaning products she was using might be responsible. “Like most people I loved using the products because you always felt a place was really clean when you were finished. But they were so toxic. One of the products, a spray for bathroom cleaning would actually corrode through my rubber gloves.”

The US Environmental Protection Agency found that pollutant levels in the home can be up to five times as high as outside and that one of the key causes of these indoor air pollutants are conventional cleaning products which can be loaded with petroleum-distilled chemicals and fragrances.

Klint read the book Cleaning Yourself to Death, Pat Thomas’ guide to the toxicity of household cleaners. “It was a real turning point for me. I knew I had to change everything if I was to keep going with my business, which I really wanted to because I had built up a really good base of customers. I found recipes for natural products and started making them myself and within a month my symptoms had cleared up.”

She also noted that whenever she mentioned to people that she made her own cleaning products, they would always ask her where they could buy them. I started to think; there really could be a business in this.”

To say her business had humble beginnings is an understatement. “O God,” she laughs, “I was so bad. I was filling old milk cartons and plastic bottles with the liquids and printing out labels on my computer. It was fairly amateurish. My friend owned a health food store in Wicklow and she started stocking them and there were people coming down from Dublin to buy them. I was getting calls from people who would be explaining symptoms to me and I knew they were similar to mine.”

The business has grown substantially since (“it was crawling along for a while but now it’s learning to walk” is how she describes it) to the point where Klint points to increasing brand awareness, particularly on the east coast. In 2005 herself and her partner moved out of Wicklow and bought a property in Eskivaude, County Cork. Her business is now based in a rented unit in Castletownbere. “I fell in love with this area about two years before I moved here. And of course it’s so much cheaper to run a business. The prices were going up all the time in Wicklow whereas we can rent premises here for about a fifth of the cost.”

Lilly’s Eco Clean currently employs 3 people but could hardly be considered mass-market. “Far from it. All the bottling and labelling is done by hand although I am hoping to get a bottling machine soon as we are more or less at the limit of what we can do. We are producing about 400 bottles a week at present so it’s labour intensive.”

Interestingly these products are now available in more mainstream stores including some Supervalu stores in Munster, Dublin Food Coop, and Ardkeen in Waterford. “When I started we were mainly focussed on health stores which was great but they have limited floor space. It’s brilliant how positive the multiples are starting to be towards these products.”

I mention my concerns about effectiveness and in particular my Belfast sink challenge. Has she a product up to the job? She recommends her degreaser liquid with a little bit of baking powder added. “It’s vinegar based so it will bubble up when you add the baking powder. It’s very effective. There’s also a natural alternative to bleach called sodium percarbonate which is very good. I think we get hung up on the notion that we need bleach to get a surface really clean. I mean you could throw acid in your sink and it would clean it up nicely but you wouldn’t do that because of the dangers. You should be thinking the same way about bleach.” Fair point.”

For details on stockists, see http://www.lillysecoluv.com
Cleaning Yourself to Death: How Safe Is Your Home? by Pat Thomas is available from Amazon and all good book stores.