Green Cleaning- Do You Know the Ingedients?

Beautiful sunny day, and a clear sky. Good bye February!


It’s March - the official month of spring – when we humans get that urge to begin spring cleaning. There seems to be a bottle, can, box, spray, pump, wipe or tube for just about anything you want to clean. And Madison Avenue has done a good job convincing us that we need a separate cleaner for laundry, dishes, floors, tile, grout, toilets, sinks, tubs, walls, furniture, counters, bathrooms, stoves, woodwork, carpeting, windows and even computers. Whew!

There is a growing movement called "transparency" that has made it to the cleaning world. A law suit pending in New York is asking manufactures to disclose their ingredients because consumers have a right to know which chemicals they are using, touching and breathing. An old law on the NY books says that companies are supposed to disclose ingredients, but this has never been enforced. Some companies like Seventh Generation have come forward to disclose their ingredients, while others have refused to do so. For the full article: CLICK

Over 80,000 chemicals are on the market, but only a small fraction of these have been tested for safety. Many cleaning ingredients are down right bad for you and are bad for the environment. The labeling on cleaning products is unregulated allowing companies to make claims like “natural” and “biodegradable” without definitive guidelines. Consumers have the right to be safe and decide which products to use based on ingredients. The food industry now requires transparency in its ingredients and this should be required for all cleaning and personal care products, as well. Should you feel an investigative urge, check out these websites:
Household Products Data Base

Environmental Health and Toxicology

For simple safe cleaning try:



Cleaning products don’t just vanish after use. They go into our air and water supplies causing pollution, algae blooms, and upsetting the delicate eco-balance with anti-bacterial chemicals. Please, make wise choices. If a company says their ingredients are a secret, it could mean there is something that they don’t want you to know. You have a right to know the ingredients, you deserve safe cleaning products, and so does the environment…we all live down stream.