By Marilyn, on October 3rd, 2012
Baking soda —for baking and keeping your refrigerator smelling fresh— but it is for so much more! For those of us who would like to use less harmful chemicals, baking soda is one of the answers! I have been thinking about using baking soda for relieving my heartburn but, I could not find the formula on the super huge bag I got at Costco. When I googled baking soda, I found lots of good information and uses for baking soda.
On this website, I found not only the formula for relief of heartburn, but six other surprising personal uses. You can use baking soda as a to clean your teeth or give your toothpaste extra power to whiten your teeth, exfoliate your elbows, feet or other rough spots, soften your skin, clear up acne, clean your hair of residues left by hair products, and as deodorant.
Another website had 51 uses of baking soda. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate. The author Melissa Breyer explains that baking soda “helps regulate pH—keeping a substance neither too acidic nor too alkaline.” Using baking soda instead of toxic chemical cleaning products is a great and inexpensive way to save ourselves and our planet. Here are several of her ideas:
Clean: brushes and combs, a soft scrub on bathtubs and counters, dishes, pots and pans, furniture, oil spills on garage floors, sticky spots in your car, tree sap and tar on your car, and polish your silver and jewelry (I have done this—it works!).
Freshen and deodorize: laundry, sponges (this works great on the sea sponges I use for my face), refrigerators, cutting boards, cars, trash cans, drains, dishwashers, cat boxes, stuffed animals, shoes and carpets to name a few.
Also, baking soda is good to extinguish a small oil fire in your kitchen, stop the itch and pain of a bee sting or mosquito bite. We used baking soda with vinegar to unclog our drain. I am sure there are many other uses and some of them were used long before we turned to the toxic cleansers.
Baking soda is produced from nahcolite and mined. “Naturally occurring deposits of nahcolite (NaHCO3) are found in the Eocene-age (55.8–33.9 Ma) Green River Formation, Piceance Basin in Colorado. Nahcolite was deposited as beds during periods of high evaporation in the basin. It is commercially mined using in-situ leach techniques involving dissolution of the nahcolite by heated water that is pumped through the nahcolite beds and reconstituted through a natural cooling crystallization process.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_bicarbonate
Resources, to read more and recipes: (or Google Baking soda)
Good – Seven Surprising Uses for Baking Soda
Care2 – 51 Fantastic Uses for Baking Soda
