It’s Not Easy Being Green

, 11:00 am by Kim Manson

In the eternal battle for cleanliness, it can easy to forget healthiness. Our cleaning routines can be somewhat alike chemical warfare. Most the time there’s a huge list of not so nice ingredients on the products we use – not even knowing what they are, or what the implications are for our long term health. Chemical warfare in your home and office!

The Risk of Declining Health

The world we live in is full of wonderful medical advances, designed to prolong and improve life. Yet we have hit a barrier in some health areas, and declined in some as well. This is concerning as there are a unknown multitude of factors that could be leading to these issues. One such that was identified in recent years is the use of BPA in plastics that we use to heat our food, even our babies milk in – leading to a hormonal load that was making us sick.

What else are we using on a daily basis, is making us sick that we don’t know about yet?

Most would agree that cleaning products are likely to have a toxic effect. What is unknown is what those toxic effects could be, 10, 20, even 50 years down the track.

Going Green

To avoid the toxic nature of the cleaning we all do, there is plenty we can do to go green with our clean

  • Choose green cleaning products

Read your labels when buying pre-made cleaning products. There are ranges that are ‘Earth’ and ‘Environmentally’ friendly. Meaning that they are not toxic in the water table or to animals in the environment. If it’s a better alternative for the Earth, its better for us too.

  • Avoid poor indoor air quality

It is not uncommon for the air inside a home or office to be more toxic than the air outside. This is because of the presence of toxic materials and substances and the fact that homes and buildings are better insulated than ever before (which is a good thing from an energy standpoint). Keeping windows open as often as possible allows fresh air in and keeps toxins flowing out. This is especially important when cleaning your home.

  • Don’t over do the Antibacterial cleaners

There is no better way to breed a superbug with a vulnerable population than to sanitise everything, all the time. When you constantly eradicate germs, they become resistant, and the fact that you have been sanitising your surrounds all the time means you have no resistance to them – your body has no immunity left, in turn doing the reverse of the intended and spreading germs and pathogens.

  • Use naturally occurring alternatives to chem lab creations

Baking Soda, Vinegar, Citrus Peel extracts, Lemon Juice – all of these natural substances are great and powerful cleaners. When in doubt, good old water does a great job at cleaning down lots of surfaces, with the added bonus of not unbalancing ph and bacterial balance.

  • Ask your cleaner to go Green

An environmentally aware cleaning service such as Goddess Cleaning Group is more than happy to utilise any green cleaning tactics you like – and have quite a few in their arsenal already available. From Enjo to Cleaning your mirrors with elbow grease and vinegar – we can still get your house sparkling clean without the use of the chemical arsenal.

 

Chemicals By the Numbers

from Tree hugger.com https://www.treehugger.com/htgg/how-to-go-green-cleaning.html

 

    • 17,000: the number of petrochemicals available for home use, only 30 percent of which have been tested for exposure to human health and the environment.

 

    • 63: the number of synthetic chemical products found in the average American home, translating to roughly 10 gallons of harmful chemicals.

 

    • 100: the number of times higher that indoor air pollution levels can be above outdoor air pollution levels, according to US EPA estimates.

 

    • 275: the number of active ingredients in antimicrobials that the EPA classifies as pesticides because they are designed to kill microbes.

 

    • 5 billion: the number of pounds of chemicals that the institutional cleaning industry uses each year.

 

    • 23: the average gallons of chemicals (that’s 87 Litres) that a janitor uses each year, 25 percent of which are hazardous.

 

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