Take 'green' to the cleaners with new products, old recipes

— -- Is it possible to clean green? Is it necessary to give up Mr. Clean to be green?

If you're not sure, that may explain the surge in books, magazine articles and websites explaining how you can clean and "detox" your home without chemicals found in familiar cleaning products such as Mr. Clean.

But the bald-headed guy with the big biceps and the white T-shirt is not giving up his market share so easily. He's, well, cleaning himself up, or at least trying to smell nicer, as more sweeter-fragranced "green" cleaners challenge industry leaders — Big Soap — for space on store shelves.

Meanwhile, the retro cleaning movement is urging more consumers away from cleaners altogether, touting the cleaning (and cost-effective) properties of such familiar household items as vinegar, lemon juice and baking soda.

We have come a long way since the Whole Earth Catalog became the green bible of the 1960s counterculture. "Green is part of the culture and part of lifestyle now," says Adam Lowry, co-founder of Method, which bills itself as the "environmentally friendly" brand of cleaning products. Lowry and Method partner Eric Ryan wrote Squeaky Green: The Method Guide to Detoxing Your Home (Chronicle Books, $16.95). They say the chemicals in household cleaners could be worse for you than dirt and dust.

"Green is a marketing term, not a scientific one, and in consumer marketing overall, green is probably overused, " says Brian Sansoni, who represents Big Soap as spokesman for The Soap and Detergent Association, whose 105 members control most of the estimated $16 billion-$17 billion U.S. cleaning market.

But everybody understands what "toxic" means. "You know how a plastic shower curtain smells? That's off-gassing a bunch of chemicals," says Lowry, whose book is packed with details about "nasty stuff that lies hidden in your home."

"The problem with chemicals is that we don't know what they do at very low levels, and it's expensive to do a risk assessment of a shower curtain off-gassing in a home," Lowry says. (His solution: Get a cloth shower curtain.)