February 17, 2005

Spring Cleaning

By Lorraine Sanders
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

Spring cleaning used to mean weeks of slogging away with horse-hair brushes and boiled-fat soaps. Today it’s much easier. With an astonishing array of powerful cleaning brands on the market, one could clean house without scrubbing at all. But environmentalists and public health advocates worry that products promising fast action with little effort are rife with chemicals hazardous to the environment and consumers.

"We count on the store or some government agency to do the right thing, and people are shocked when they learn that those agencies aren't necessarily doing that job for them. So we have to be responsible for paying attention to what we allow our families to come in contact with," says Lawrence Comras, founder of San Francisco online retailer Green Home.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission oversees household cleaning products after they appear on store shelves, but the Commission has no authority over items before they’re marketed. Manufacturers are not required to subject their products to testing by neutral third parties before selling them. Oftentimes, the only information a consumer has about a product comes from the label.

"Consumers are misinformed that all of the product ingredients appear on the label, when, in fact, they do not," says Elizabeth Sword, who was the Executive Director of the California-based nonprofit Children's Health Environmental Coalition until her retirement earlier this year.
Under the 1960 Federal Hazardous Substances Labeling Act, consumer product labels don’t have to disclose ingredients' harmful side effects unless they have the potential to occur immediately after improper product use.

According to Sword, labels often omit inactive or inert ingredients, which can make up as much as 90 percent of a product's volume. These include solvents, dispersal agents, dyes, and fragrances, some of which can pollute the air and water. Others are suspected carcinogens or irritate the respiratory system.

What consumers can learn from labels can be summed up in three simple words: danger, warning and caution, each of which measures the risk level associated with swallowing different amounts of the wrong thing. Ingesting a few drops to a teaspoon of a substance with a danger label could be lethal; warning means eating a teaspoon to an ounce can be deadly; while caution means life threatening symptoms can be induced after ingesting an ounce or more.

This labeling system provides consumers with little information with which to make a sophisticated purchasing decision; after all, few of us buy cleaning products with the intent of eating them. What’s more, chemicals can be unsafe in different ways. Some harm the environment, while others may be hazardous to human health.

For example, many cleaners contain petroleum-based detergents called surfactants. Extracting and refining the petroleum for these products pollutes the air. Synthetic surfactants called alkyphenol ethoxylates (APEs), which are present in some detergents and cleaning products, don’t biodegrade well, and cause water pollution.

Toluene, a chemical found in some stain removers, has been classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as a carcinogen, and studies have linked it to neurological problems and birth defects. Ammonia, a naturally occurring gas and ingredient in many cleaning products, is not harmful at very low exposure, but ammonia fumes can irritate lungs and skin and may trigger asthma in children.

A chemical's potential risk to humans depends on how it’s used, its concentration and whether the person exposed is sensitive to the ingredient. An asthma trigger in one person may have little impact on another. To further complicate matters, little research has been done to determine the long-term effects of exposure to common cleaning products.

"Since World War II, there have been something like 50,000 chemicals introduced. We just don't know if these chemicals are good for us or not. We do know that many of them are bad for us," says Comras.

"This issue about indoor environments is an area where we don't have as much info as we would like. What things kids are exposed to in the home -- be it lead, consumer products, pesticide use -- We really have very little information about that," says Tracey Woodruff, a senior scientist for the EPA.

Woodruff suggests concerned consumers consult the National Institutes of Health Household Products Database (http://hpd.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/household/search) for information about specific ingredients and products.

Hard and fast answers about ingredients and their dangers may be scarce, but Sword says there's one surefire way to know whether you're using dangerous chemicals when you clean. "I'm finding that it's pretty simple to know if what you are living with has the potential to harm, and that is the strength of the smell. Somehow we've become conditioned to dismiss that physiological red flag, like it's okay that we can smell this terrible thing," she says.

Another red flag, says Comras, is the product that makes cleaning too easy. "Everything on television advertises that you don't even have to scrub. You just pour it in and you're done," he says. According to Comras, the speed with which some commercial products work is a testament to their harsh ingredients.

For many consumers, going natural is the answer, even if it means sacrificing a little convenience. Natural cleaning products may not be available from your regular grocery store and, if they are, they may be more expensive than mainstream brands. They can also require more scrubbing than the super fast-acting cleaner you're used to.

Fortunately, consumers can clean almost anything in their homes using inexpensive, time-honored ingredients like vinegar, baking soda, lemon juice and boric acid. It's also easy to find natural products in online stores and at grocery stores like Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl and Trader Joe's.

"Of course, it's every choice you make, but the cleaning products are a perfect place to start because you're dealing with them everyday and it makes a huge impact," says Comras.

Additional resources for readers:
Green Home, an online Bay Area retailer of natural cleaning products: http://www.greenhome.com
Children's Health Environmental Coalition, for more information on household cleaning products, chemicals and children's health: http://www.checnet.org
National Institutes of Health Household Products Database, http://householdproducts.nlm.nih.gov
Green Home article on safe cleaners you can make at home: http://www.greenhome.com/info/magazine/001/makemyself.html