5 Ways to Green Clean Stainless Steel

Stainless steel appliances are everywhere these days. Unfortunately, so are our fingerprints! Here are five bright ideas for keeping the stainless steel in your home brilliant without using toxic chemicals.

1. Olive Oil 
Blogger Natural Mommie polished her stainless steel fridge with just water and olive oil. First, she wiped the refrigerator down with a wet cloth. Then she poured 1 TBS olive oil on another cloth and used that to buff away watermarks and smudges. (Check out her post to see awesome before and after pics.)

2. Flour
A surprising trick I learned from BrightNest: "To keep a stainless steel sink from losing its luster, sprinkle white flour throughout your dry sink. Rub it lightly with a dry, soft cloth and let it sit for a few minutes. Rinse the flour away and watch your sink shine."(Read more amazing things flour can do: Flour Power: 6 Clever Household Uses for Flour.)

3. Microfiber Cloth
E-Cloth makes a microfiber cloth designed specifically for cleaning stainless steel. You can use it to clean with just a spritz of water and buff dry with a finished cloth. I have this, though truthfully I'm not sure I noticed a significant difference between using the specialized cloth and the general purpose e-cloths. Both seem to work fine.

4. Bon Ami Powder Cleanser
I use Bon Ami to clean all the stainless steel in my home. It's ideal for sinks, pans, and surfaces that can be rinsed. Still, I even used it on the fridge in my old apartment and to clean small rust stains from a client's dishwasher. The problem with using this on appliances is you to must be careful to not use much product, wet wipe many times to remove product, and be sure to buff dry. It can be time consuming, but the results are nice. It's the only thing that worked to remove rust stains for me. (If your supermarket doesn't sell Bon Ami, you can buy a 12 pack on Amazon at a pretty good price.)

5. Better Life's Einshine & what-EVER!
Einshine is a completely natural ("GMO free, cruelty free, made in the USA, fragrance free, sulfate free and petroleum free.")  stainless steel cleaner made by Better Life. I haven't tried Einshine, but if it's anything like the Better Life products I did try it's probably awesome! I still use their what-EVER! all-purpose cleaner to shine up my little toaster.

What do you use to clean stainless steel?

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