Bon Ami Powder Cleanser is your good friend when it come to green cleaning. In fact, it has been a natural cleaner since before cleaning turned chemical.

Bon Ami is America’s original natural home cleaner!

In the late 19th Century, quartz was a key ingredient in scouring soaps. In New England mines, quartz was entwined with feldspar. After the minerals were separated, the feldspar was discarded.

J.T. Robertson saw that the softer feldspar could be used to create a less abrasive soap. The process would be cheaper (the feldspar was trash, after all), and the product would be better. Working from a gristmill on property owned by Gurdon Hicks Childs, Robertson ground feldspar to a fine powder, mixed it with liquid soap in wooden troughs, cured and cut it into cakes – and gave his soap a name: Bon Ami.

What I love about Bon Ami is not only is a very effective at cleaning, I can read and understand the ingredient list.  It is the cleaner my midwife brought to our rented apartment to help clean up after my son was born.  It is a cleaner I trust.

Bon Ami is my favorite cleaner for the bathroom. The gentler powder is quite effective at cleaning the toilet, as well as removing hard water stains and soap scum in the bath/shower.

Bon Ami started off all natural and their environmental stewardship has continue to this day.

Green chemistry is a design process that strives to reduce or eliminate the use of hazardous substances. It’s the best way to describe Bon Ami’s approach to product design. We didn’t start out striving to be green. We just started out with simple ingredients and simple processes to give you products that work well without dangerous chemicals.

One green chemistry tactic involves finding new uses for what was once considered waste. (An empty plastic bottle, for example, doesn’t need to be waste: It can be recycled to make something new.) This approach, too, is part of our roots. A key ingredient in our scrubbing powder, first sold in 1886, was feldspar. At the time, feldspar was a waste product at quartz mines, and was being tossed away – until someone noticed that shovels used in the tossing were always shiny. One company’s waste became another company’s key ingredient.

For more than a hundred years, we’ve stuck to a short list of ingredients largely because our company culture led us to keep the recipes simple. As environmental awareness grew in and around our company, we found other reasons to stick with the simple ingredients. What was once a habit or a sense of tradition became an intentional pursuit and a statement of purpose. Today, it’s more important than ever to keep it simple.