Day 179 of our Green Year: Neutralize Pet Odors

If you have pets, then chances are you have pet odors. These can get a bit much when you have a lot of pets, but there are natural ways to deal with them. What we are talking about here is when your pets happen to pee on the rug or floor, which does happen, even when they are well-trained. Usually, pets will return to the same place in the house to pee, and that includes their mistakes, especially with cats. Since pets have an amazing sense of smell, they can smell the residue from the previous pee and they will mark that area again with their pee.

Rather than buying pet deodorizers that may do more harm than good to the air around you, there are some easy tips to neutralizing the odor. Just take some baking soda and vinegar and alternate them for cleaning. Also, sprinkling the area with baking soda and leaving it overnight will work quite well.

After you have done that, you need to neutralize the alkaline baking soda using vinegar. Use a wash of two cups vinegar, one gallon of water. You won't need all of that but it gives you the approx. measurements that will be needed.

Wash the area completely and the smell of vinegar will disappear after a few hours. Then, there will be no more smell and the pets shouldn't try and pee in that area again.

Our dogs are all trained not to pee in the house, but sometimes the cats get mad if we are not quick enough to clean the kitty litter (despite doing it on a daily basis) and they may pee in the bathtub (we do have one that does it on occasion).

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Bottled water is bad, and for that reason we banned it early on in Our Green Year. Well, a new study by the Environmental Working Group found that bottled water often contains disinfection by-products, fertilizer residue and pain medication. The cost of bottled water is about 1,900 times greater than tap water, and people pay that much because they think it is 'pure', but that is far from the truth.

Bottled water sold at many places, including Walmart, was found to contain a mix of chlorine and fluoride, like in municipal water, so it is not quite pure. In the bottled water industry, unlike with tap water, the companies do no have to reveal the chemical components of its products.

Some other brands tested had fertilizer byproducts in them, prescription medication remains, industrial chemicals, bacteria, arsenic and boron. Even worse, one bottled water brand was found to create a 78 percent increase in breast cancer cells!

Mmmmmm bottled water...