Your dirty laundry basket can be a real washing challenge because between muddy baby clothes, sweaty sports clothes and faded fabrics, your detergent can struggle. However, instead of turning to bleach to get out of trouble and whiten your laundry, you can use natural and eco-friendly products to accomplish this mission.
Reviving yellowed fabric, removing stains and dirt while restoring shine to linen , this is the natural “know-how” of environmentally friendly natural products such as sodium bicarbonate, among others
How to whiten laundry with baking soda?
For those who do not prefer to take risks by exploiting the whitening power of bleach, sodium bicarbonate represents a very interesting alternative due to its natural ability to whiten laundry . Although its deodorizing power is more often recognized, baking soda can make a difference and improve the cleaning effect of detergent.
Therefore, this multipurpose household powder is able to gently clean your laundry by acting on bad odors and stubborn stains. Furthermore, it helps keep the washing machine clean by being a good substitute for fabric softener.
To use it in this way, add half a cup of baking soda to your detergent and proceed with your usual washing. if you have a large load of laundry add a cup of baking soda.
Other eco-friendly and natural ways to whiten your laundry
Since your pantry is unlikely to contain only baking soda, it’s safe to say you also have any of the following ingredients. This is good because they are great natural whiteners that are at the top of grandma’s basket of cleaning tips.
Whiten laundry with lemon
Pour 1 or 2 cups of lemon juice into a bowl of hot water. Soak the white laundry and let it sit for 2 hours. Then machine wash. If you want to further guarantee its effectiveness, you can immerse the laundry in boiling water and wait for the lemon to act overnight. The next day all you have to do is let the white items dry in the sun.
Whiten laundry with white vinegar
Not only is white vinegar very effective as a whitening agent but also as a deodorizer. Ideal for fabrics subject to mold. To use it as a whitener, pour a quarter cup into the fabric softener drawer during the final rinse cycle.
Whiten your laundry with hydrogen peroxide
For whiter-than-white laundry, you have another ingredient that works as a great whitening agent while targeting tough stains: hydrogen peroxide. All you have to do is pour a cup of 3% hydrogen peroxide into the detergent drawer and then activate the usual wash cycle. Peroxide is also the ally of enterprising people because it allows for various ingenious uses.
Whitens laundry prone to stubborn stains with the combination of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide
Think of yellow stains, grease stains or even oil stains and sweat marks. In this case, make a homogeneous mixture of hydrogen peroxide and bicarbonate and then apply the paste obtained directly to the stains in question . Leave the mixture to act for 30 minutes to 1 hour. Remove excess residue from the product using a clean, used toothbrush before placing the garment in the machine.
Whiten your laundry with a concentrated product
Are you faced with particularly dirty white laundry that seems almost unrecoverable? No problem because the aforementioned products can go very well together and therefore act in tandem for an even more uplifting result . To do this, prepare a large container in which you will mix the following quantities: ½ cup baking soda, 1 cup hydrogen peroxide, ¼ cup lemon juice, and 6 cups water. This is keeping in mind that the less water, the more concentrated the solution you will have. Then choose the dose according to your needs.
Immerse your white clothes in the concentrated mixture for a few hours then finish by rinsing them thoroughly with water and putting them in the washing machine.