All-Purpose Cleaner Concentrate

Following on from  Surfactants P6: Cleaning Solutions For Around The Home (updated version), I thought I would share the latest experimenting I have been doing with some of our new products, particularly a new surfactant.

I decided to make up a general purpose concentrate gel that gives you bang for your buck, and most importantly, really cleans well. It is 100% natural and biodegradable too.

I like lauryl glucoside here because it creates very stable foam and is, I find, the strongest of the glucosides. It also has a fantastically thick paste-like consistency that can boost the whole formula. 

But our star ingredient in this recipe is the  sodium lauroyl sarcosinate. It is the first anionic surfactant to feature on Essentially Natural, and is proudly sourced from natural ingredients and is easily biodegradable. The anionic surfactants are very powerful detergents and are typically used in household cleaners. They also have properties that give them the ability to be thickened by salt (so no need for xanthan gum), and sodium lauroyl sarcosinate responds uniquely to pH: it goes beautifully thick and viscous at pH 5! So if you add just enough citric acid solution to bring the pH down to 5, you get the most wonderful gel-like consistency. 

The below recipe makes a concentrate gel (and quite a lot of it) that you can then use either on its own for particularly tough and grimy patches, or diluted as a general purpose cleaner. It works out incredibly cheap and you probably won’t need anything else. It really blasts through grease and shines up my stovetop like nothing else. You can use it in the kitchen, bathroom, floors and windows, and anywhere grimy.

This is a great opportunity to reuse the buckets that various EN products come in, such as the Epsom salts. I always keep the buckets once the product inside is finished, and you can easily peel off the label and relabel it for another purpose. The bucket is a perfect storage container for the all purpose concentrate.