An Eco-Friendly Home Cleaning Guide

This eco-friendly home cleaning guide will help you to implement green cleaning practices in your home. It is well known that most household cleaning products contain toxic chemicals as well as known or suspected carcinogens. Many of these chemicals are prohibited in the workplace whereas their use in the home is unregulated. The use of common household products like air fresheners, all purpose cleaners, glass cleaners, floor and furniture polish, mold removers and disinfectant cleaners have been linked to heart problems, high and low blood pressure, skin irritation, allergic reactions, lung damage, cancer and a host of other chronic diseases. For example when chlorine bleach is mixed with ammonia or acidic cleaners it forms chloramine gas which is extremely toxic.

It is easy to tell which of your home cleaning products are toxic. All you have to do is study the labels on the bottles and packages and look for toxic ingredients. Some of the known toxic ingredients commonly found in commercial household cleaning products are ammonia, chlorine, phenol, oxalic acid, phosphates, calcium hypochlorite, naptha nitrobenzene, ethanol, diethyl alcohol, sodium hydroxide, petroleum distillate, 1,4-dichlorobenzene, potassium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified all these common ingredients as toxic.

The good news is that using the safe and eco-friendly cleaners need not be a time consuming or costly affair. You can find some vegetable-enzyme based non-toxic household cleaning products in the health food stores and even supermarkets. Still it is very difficult to be 100% sure about commercial cleaning products because unlike manufacturers of food products home cleaning product manufacturers are not required to disclose all the ingredients in their products.