Hand contact spreads 80% of infections. For each minute of the work day, you touch an average of 30 objects. There are over 20,000 germs on every square inch of your desk, which is almost 400 times the amount found on toilets. Approximately 3000 bacteria lurk on your hands. Women’s hands harbor a more diverse variety of microbes than those of men.

These unsettling statistics are enough to make germophobes out of us all. But, you can’t very well run to the bathroom every five minutes to wash up. That will get you an interesting reputation around the office. So save yourself some money and help the environment, too, by making your own sanitizers. These antiseptic gels can easily be concocted using basic household items.

In a small bowl, mix ¼ cup each of pure aloe vera gel and grain alcohol with 5 drops of tea tree essential oil. To make it smell less pungent, add 5 drops of your favorite fragrance oil. Using a funnel, pour this blend into a bottle small enough to stash in your purse. (Rinse out an empty tube of makeup or lotion to make use of waste.)

Now, what about your contaminated desk? Don’t even think about buying a can of Lysol! Here’s an all-natural alternative:

Pour ¼ cup each of tea tree essential oil, lavender essential oil and white vinegar into a spray bottle. Add 2 cups of distilled water and shake well. Clean your work space using this blend every evening before you go home to disinfect surfaces.

For more tips, check out Mike’s green guide to chemical-free cleaning.

Image: Weird Beard

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Living in New Zealand, a country that has, in my opinion, the best and safest drinking water, it’s hard to imagine that one-sixth of the world’s population (nearly one billion people) are without clean water on a daily basis.

Most of us simply acknowledge information such as this by finding an organization to donate some money to help fund clean water campaigns and then move on to the next pressing issue. But some Iowa engineering students didn’t. They heard the facts and then rolled up their sleeves and designed a $5, hand-held device that can sanitize water, saving lives as a result.

What started as a simple class project has developed into something much, much bigger. The hand sanitizer took away the First Prize at the 2008 Environmental Protection Agency Awards, a prize that is worth $75,000. The win is prestigious enough but to the students at UI College of Engineering, the money is the key, for it’s going to be used to make water sanitizers available to Ghana and other developing countries in the future.

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Image: Snap

The post Changing the World for $5 appeared first on EcoSalon.