Are Your Cleaning Products As Clean As You Think?
The nitty gritty of green cleaning
The nitty gritty of green cleaning
Today, we’re diving in to natural cleaning products: the brands we recommend, our best tips, and the risks of non-natural products.
Cleaning products in the household have seen a slow “green” transition over the past few years: we’ve gone from Windex Original to a company-proclaimed “clean” version of the same product, still complete with the eye-and-nose-burning scent associated with the cleaning days of our childhoods.
More recently, there has been an obvious shift toward a natural approach to cleaning, with brands such as Method and Mrs. Meyer’s occupying the household essentials aisles of most supermarkets, as well as companies like Target launching their own “natural” lines like Ever Spring.
There’s no denying that we have come a long way from cleaning our living spaces with nauseatingly-fragrant products that were ultimately doing more harm than good. However, there’s much to be done in educating the masses on the risks of these household name brand cleaning products and the payoff in switching over to clean alternatives.
As always, it’s incredibly unfortunate that the onus falls on the consumer to make the safe choice. All products should be safe for people to purchase without the possibility of the ingredients leading to long term health effects and/or premature death. 1
There are a number of organizations we can support who working to make safe products the norm: Made Safe | Greenpeace | Moms Clean Air Force | NRDC | Campaign for Safe Cosmetics | Safer States | EWG |
If you’re interested, you can watch Stink! on Netflix as well as Toxic Beauty on Apple TV to learn more about the lengths that corporations go to deny and cover up the toxicity of their ingredients.
How do I know What’s Clean and what isn’t?
Download the Think Dirty app to scan and look up your products, or search for products on the EWG Skin Deep Database. Both resources will give you a rating, list of ingredients and the harmful effects of each ingredient in your products.
Which cleaning brands are the safest?
Public Goods (SNLPGA for 15% off)
Biokleen | Available at Target, Walgreens, Walmart, Amazon
Any cleaning product that contains a vague “fragrance” or “parfum” is risky: fragrance often contains up to 4,000 unlabeled ingredients including phthalates, some of which are labeled “probably carcinogens”: cancer-causing in animals and possibly humans. 3
Long term exposure to formaldehyde, which is often found in toxic cleaning products, has been shown to be associated with an increased risk of cancer of the nose and accessory sinuses, nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal cancer, and lung cancer in humans.
In addition to being harmful to humans through direct consumption, disposal concerns for toxic cleaning products are high as well. Many aforementioned chemicals used in traditional household cleaning products are dangerous to the environment, finding themselves in rivers after disposal, working their way into the food chain and a persistence of breakdown from containers. Aerosol products also often use chlorofluorocarbons which are non-toxic, but have been proven harmful to the ozone layer. 4
Our Tips
Be conscious of correctly recycling and composting based on labels and local regulations
Buy liquid and spray products rather than aerosol
Check ingredient lists for must-avoid ingredients such as: fragrance, ammonia, formaldehyde, etc.
When in doubt, the healthiest products to use are DIY
We hope that this information brings further awareness to this topic and allows for you to make purchases that will benefit your long term health. Have a lovely day!
Disclosure: we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you if you decide to buy any of the products we refer to and promote. All opinions remain our own.