For clients aiming to reduce the toxic burden in their household, we offer a green cleaning surface, using only non-toxic, environmentally-friendly products.
Toxic ingredients present in everyday cleaning products may leave our living environment clean, but they certainly don’t keep our homes healthy. Your cleaning cupboard could be harbouring bottles filled with neurotoxins, mood altering chemicals, hormone disrupters and carcinogens.
The constant presence of these toxins in our home environment poses a threat to our health, and may be a contributory factor to the rise in prevalence of conditions such as asthma and cancer.
The Enemy In Your Home
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that far from being a safe haven away from outdoor pollutants, the air quality inside your home could be 2-5 times more polluted than the air outside. Household cleaners are a significant contributor to that contamination.
Many household cleaners come with hazard warnings, and advice to keep away from skin and eyes. But even if every precaution is taken when using these products, your body is still exposed to their effects in the air, and through skin contact with surfaces after cleaning.
Common Household Toxins
Here are a just a few of the known contaminants lurking in everyday cleaning products, and the impact they could be having on your health:
1. 2-Butoxyethanol (also called 2-BE or butyl cellosolve)
Commonly found in glass cleaner, oven cleaner and laundry stain remover. This product is a known eye and skin irritant, and has been linked with blood disorders, and reproductive problems.
2. Coal Tar Dyes
These substances in no way improve the effectiveness of the product, but are instead used to give them a vibrant, powerful appearance. The dyes, used in most types of cleaning product, are derived from petrochemicals. Synthetic dyes have been associated with cancer, while heavy metals that may contaminate the dye, such as lead, cadmium and arsenic, can cause damage to the nervous system.
3. Ammonia
Used in a huge array of cleaning products including bathroom, toilet and drain cleaners, ammonia is known to irritate the skin, eyes, lungs and throat. Cleaning products often warn about the dangers of using more than one product at a time. This is because when combined ammonia and chlorine bleach form the highly poisonous gas chloramine.
4. Sodium Lauryl Sulfate
Used in personal washing products as well as washing up liquid, laundry detergents and toilet cleaners, sodium lauryl sulfate is a known skin irritant, and research has shown may be toxic to the environment.
Impact On the Environment
The products you use at home, have an impact on the wider environment too. Once the product has been used, many of the toxins become airborne, and can be released through doors and windows. There is also leakage of toxins through your waste water as the product is washed away down your sink, bath or toilet. Finally, when the empty bottles are sent to the landfill site, the remaining toxic contents are free to seep into the surrounding soil.
Greener Alternatives
Replacing chemical and synthetic household cleaners with green alternatives will reduce you and your family’s exposure to unwanted chemicals in your home.
As consumer awareness improves, and demand for green cleaning products increases, many major supermarkets now stock alternative environmentally-friendly brands, so its easy to make the switch.
For clients aiming to reduce the toxic burden in their household, we offer a green cleaning surface, using only non-toxic, environmentally-friendly products.
