I Found a New Way to Clean My Toilet, and Now It’s Actually Fun (Yes, Really!)

I pretty much never clean my bathroom. In my house, cleaning is an even split — I take the front rooms (office, living room, dining room, kitchen) while my husband takes the back rooms (the long hallway, guest room, bathroom, bedroom, and his music room). We never switch off because one thing I absolutely hate doing is cleaning the bathroom. But there’s one product that does have me occasionally volunteering to clean my toilet, of all things — Blueland’s Toilet Bowl Cleaner. 

Blueland is an eco-friendly cleaning company that is working to take as much plastic waste out of its product pipeline as possible. The toilet cleaner is another extension of that work — the starter set comes with one metal “Forever Tin” with a lid for you to store your toilet cleaner tablets and 14 cleaning tablets. After that, you can subscribe to a refill of the tablets alone — which come shipped to you in paper packaging — and refill your “Forever Tin,” well, forever. The Starter Kit is $23 (or $18.40 if you buy it with the autoship option) and refill tablets are anywhere from $1.03 to $1.29 per tablet (or about $14.40 to $18).

The toilet bowl cleaner is different from traditional liquid cleaners because it’s not packaged in plastic that you continuously have to repurchase — you invest in one metal tin (already more recyclable than plastic), and any refills come to you in paper! The cleaner itself comes in a tablet form. To clean your toilet, you simply drop the tablet (which comes in either Lemon Cedar or Peppermint Eucalyptus) into your toilet bowl and let it fizz away. Then, when you’re ready to clean the toilet, you grab your toilet bowl scrubber and scrub away. You flush the whole thing down like you would any other cleaner. 

The cleaner’s ingredients are 100% bio-based, according to Blueland, and microplastic-free. I’m trying to cut down on my plastic use everywhere, so this is definitely a plus. The ingredients include sodium bicarbonate, citric acid, maltodextrin, water, sodium lauryl sulfate, canola seed oil, limonene, lemongrass oil or peppermint oil depending on your scent, and sodium benzoate, all naturally derived.

As a professed never-bathroom-cleaner, when I tested this toilet bowl cleaner, I realized that I could actually enjoy cleaning the bathroom. I really mean this: It’s fun to use. It’s a bit like a science project to drop the tablet into the bowl and watch it fizz away.

I love that the toilet bowl cleaner cuts down on my continued use of plastic in my home. I know I can’t avoid using plastic completely, but making smarter choices with the cleaning products and home products that I buy — including products that help me cut down on my lifetime use of plastic — are a huge plus. I also love the peppermint scent. I haven’t tried the lemon cedar so I can’t speak for it, but having a pepperminty smelling bathroom is so nice. 

And, at the end of the day, it really works. Stubborn-to-clean stains disappear instantly. It is, of course, pricier than other cleaning products. (If you’re cleaning your toilet once a week, as I assume you are, the refill will last you 14 weeks for about $14-18 — a bottle of Method, for example, is just $5 and will last me as long at a fraction of the price.) But, for my money, it does what I need it to do, smells great, and helps me use less plastic in my home. 

Buy: Blueland Toilet Bowl Cleaner Starter Set, $23