Sparkling Clean

So I didn't mean to leave you all hanging on my Green Living posts-- I've had this one in my head for weeks, but apparently they've been busy weeks. Or something. Usually I realise at about 10 PM on Friday that I forgot, again, to post.

This is what came up when I searched
for 'toilet'. I bet they don't worry about
getting the bowl clean. Source.

This week, I'm not so much going to make a suggestion as share something that I'm having trouble with, in the hopes that perhaps some bright spark out there will have a brilliant idea. My problem? Cleaning the toilet bowl. I can't think of an environmentally-friendly way to do it.

For years, I used the traditional blue goo and toilet brush. When my last brush broke, I decided to look into alternatives and have since owned about every handle + disposable cleaning head combination currently on the market (I can rarely find the refills I want when I'm looking. This had become an expensive habit for a while). Right now, I use the Clorox wand, which at least I can eject by picking up the trash can and holding it over the toilet, so I don't drip blue chemicals + toilet water on the floor. However, I'm sure you see the problem here, because it's a single-use product. I'm not wild about that sort of thing.

A few weeks back, I was out of refills and the two shops nearest my house (a supermarket and a dollar store) did not have the correct ones. So, I decided to make do and was scrubbing our guest toilet with Comet and a rag for a little while. But I wasn't happy with this solution, either, because 1. I wear disposable gloves when I put my hands into a toilet, so I was still throwing something away, and 2. The rag went into a hot water and bleach solution to disinfect afterwards. That's a small thing, true, but it's still more hot water and more chemicals. Not the solution I was going for.

On the chemical front, I know that Seventh Generation makes a toilet bowl cleaner. Perhaps I'll try that next. But that still leaves me with the problem of what to scrub with, and I fear that I am being pushed back into the icky, probably-falling-apart embrace of a regular toilet scrubber. I guess that's better than throwing so much stuff away.

Do you have an environmentally friendly solution to your toilet woes? Or is this outside your realm of worry?