The C-Word

Actually, I'm thinking of two c-word phrases: chemical sensitivities and chemotherapy side-effects.

It's a great impulse to want to do a thorough cleaning for a loved one who is suffering. But, especially if the patient is stuck in a bed in the next room, the last thing he or she needs is someone spraying stinky chemicals around the house.

Here is an article that mentions the conditions that make it hard to tolerate most cleaning products and has links to good articles about their dangers.

Though it's been a marketing bust so far, that's the reason for JustClean. I'm pretty good at getting the attention of people who are indifferent about the cleaners I use, but clients who want me specifically because I'm not going to coat their homes with toxic chemicals are few and far between.

That being the case, I'll clean your place for nothing if you can't afford to pay for it and are suffering from allergies, lung disease, cancer treatment or any other condition that makes stinky cleaning chemicals hard to tolerate.

You heard me right. Free cleaning.

I put out some pamphlets and asked some doctors' offices in town to send needy patients to me for free services when I first started out, but referrals haven't been forthcoming. So, unless I get deluged with requests from wealthy people trying to take advantage of a subsistence business, I'm going to accept self-referrals from patients on the honor system.

If household cleaning chemicals make you sick and you don't have money to pay for my "no stink" cleaning service, call me anyway.

I sprayed enough Pledge around CPAP machines and allergists' offices in my day to create a pretty big debt to the chemically sensitive community.

Spread the word. I'm shooting for one free clean a month, but if I can tap into a real need, I'll do whatever it takes to keep up. Call or text 205-331-0422 for an appointment.

Dr. Smellgood

You know what really irritates me about working for a regular housekeeping company?

Besides the chemicals.

It's when clients remark on a job well-done by breathing deeply and sighing, "It smells so clean in here."

"Lady, that stuff doesn't smell so good when you have to breathe it all day."

OK, I have never once uttered that response. But I think it every time.

How did we become hard wired to equate stinky chemicals with clean?

We've been brainwashed

I couldn't find an authoritative "History of Stink," but I did run into an old Wall Street Journal article that explains the recent explosion of scent varieties in household cleaners. (And a newer one here.) It doesn't say how the demand was manufactured, though. And the only hint it gives that strong chemical scents might not be desirable is in a quotation at the very end of the story:

This is from a Pine-Sol magazine ad campaign that
emphasized the cleaner's "knockout" smell.

"We realized that clean doesn't smell the same to everybody," says Mr. Campbell [Jeff Campbell, the author of books on speed cleaning,]. "There really is no relationship between odors and clean. To some extent it's the opposite. The lack of odor is clean."

Somehow, Americans have become brainwashed to think that funk-masking chemicals mean things are clean.

Remember when Febreze first came out? The original unscented odor-killer went over like a lead balloon. An anecdote about that's tucked into the third section of this New York Times article from last year. Apparently, consumers were so thoroughly under the spell of Dr. Smellgood that they couldn't accept the idea of removing stink without adding new stink from perfumes.

Dirt and germs cause odors. Clean does not have an odor.
Here is Inspectapedia's massive guide to identifying and fixing household smells."Clean" is not among the multitude of home odor sources listed. 

The wages of stink

What's wrong with proliferation of scented products? So what if people want the kitchen to smell like "Fresh Linen" and the bathroom to smell like "Ocean breeze"?

Well, the thing about perfumes in cleaning chemicals is, manufacturers don't have to say what ingredients they're using to create them. Nearly all of the time, the most you'll see on a product label is "perfume" or "parfum."

A University of Washington prof was so intrigued by the subject, she and her team analyzed 25 products and found they all contained undisclosed ingredients, and more than a third of them had at least one hazardous compound.

Here's that study.  Here's an essay by that same professor that sums it up and urges people to free themselves from Dr. Smellgood. There are some chilling anecdotes in the comments section.

Here is a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council about the hazards of chemical air fresheners. Air fresheners? More like air polluters.

And it's not just perfumes. The original point of those was to cover up the even less pleasant smell of household cleaners' other ingredients.

Here is a simple and thorough factsheet from University of Washington that sums it all up. The Cleveland Clinic has a handy chart of household chemicals and dangerous ingredients here. The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (Yes, we have one of those. It's in Atlanta.) has a handy booklet about what chemicals can hurt what body systems here.

So how "fresh" does your favorite cleaning product smell now?

Happy Earth Day.

Toxic Chemicals at Work

Are you asking yourself why I care about chemical cleaner regulations and alternatives?

It took me this long to do a post about it because the reason seemed self-evident. Especially since there's a long list of good links under the "No Stink Cleaning" tab at www.JustCleanTuscaloosa.com.

Ready-made cleaning compounds marketed to homeowners are nothing to fool with. They make cleaning a nasty and dangerous activity -- for ordinary people who clean once a week or so, but especially for the maids and janitors who do it for a living.

A good place to start to see what I am talking about  is the Environmental Working Group consumer guides section. They have databases with ingredients and safety information about all kinds of commercial goods. The organization has also put together a cleaners "Hall of Shame" that rounds up innocent-sounding cleaning products that pack a toxic punch.

The list also targets store-brand cleaners, which typically don't disclose what's in them or who makes them on their labels, and air "fresheners," which pollute the air while claiming to clean it. An advocacy group called Women's Voices for the Earth went and tested a batch of name-brand products to see what unlisted ingredients were in them. Here's a summary, with a link to the full study.

Seeing a product on store shelves does not guarantee it's safe by any means. The New York Times had an article about that just this Sunday.

So if most chemicals get into the marketplace without being tested, how do we know they're bad?

An association up in Canada has a massive fact sheet with info about toxic ingredients and less hazardous alternatives here.

The American Lung Association has a short and sweet explanation -- with research citations -- here. Infection Control Today magazine has a longer, more in-depth survey of the literature around cleaning chemical exposures that's focused on chemical-intensive health care settings here. Here's a little newspaper article about the effects of the stinky perfumes that are proliferating among personal care and cleaning supplies.

Here's a 2012 article from Environmental Health Perspectives journal about hidden hazards. Short version: Avoid products with perfumes and antibacterial agents. Forbes magazine has a good, um, executive summary of the study and what to do about it here.

Are you persuaded that cleaning chemicals do more harm than good? Clean doesn't have a smell, and if it does, it's most likely not safe to breathe.

Chemistry Lesson

When it comes to cleaning, as I've said a time or two before, it's not your cleaners so much as what you do with them.

That being the case, it doesn't really matter what particular chemicals a cleaner uses. Your kitchen counter will be clean whether I use soap, or vinegar, or turn the Scrubbing Bubbles loose on it. I can get the soap scum off your bathtub with baking soda, or borax, or Comet with bleach.

There are three main ways a cleaner goes about choosing a particular chemical for a particular job: An average homemaker is going to pick something by smell (Have you seen how many "flavors" cleaning chemicals come in nowadays?) and by the recommended use stated on the label. Advanced cleaners will factor in experience, and pick the chemicals that are easiest to work with and do the best job. A really serious cleaner is going to be mindful of what it is she's cleaning, and choose chemicals that won't hurt the surfaces she wants to clean. Those Scrubbing Bubbles could eat the finish of your counter. Comet with bleach could fade the colored grout around your tub. That's the reason most professional cleaners don't use bleach these days. It's too easy to ruin a client's things with bleach.

Now ready-made cleaning products will tell you what materials they're safe to use on. But if you're avoiding color and smell and ignoring marketing claims, you don't have a whole lot to go on.

Ph 101

By Slower (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The guiding principle for figuring out what cleaner is best for what is the ph scale -- that is, the range from acid to alkaline. Here is a carpet-cleaning fact sheet that explains the details and hazards of cleaners at each end of the spectrum.

You've heard the term "ph balanced?" Shampoo and floor cleaner marketers love this one. Sounds like a special formulation that brings harmony and balance to your follicles. "Balance" has a misleading connotation. What the commercials are really saying is that their particular product is neutral, meaning it is neither acid nor alkaline, so its ph number falls in the middle of the 1-14 acidity scale.

Generally, in marketer-speak and in practice, a neutral ph of about 7 means a substance is mild and not likely to cause damage to most surfaces.

So why not just find one neutral product and go at it?

Well, plain water's neutral, and it's a great solvent, but who's going to pay me to come over and wipe everything with water?

Water can be pretty powerful all by itself (Ever hear the term "erosion"?), but when you're using a small amount in a short timespan for cleaning purposes, it could use a little boost.  When you augment your cleaning water, you want to keep it neutral, or make it more acid or more alkaline, depending on what kind of dirt you want to pick up. Acid cleaners are best for alkaline dirt like, well, dirt, as well as soap scum and nongreasy kitchen dirt. Alkaline cleaners are best for acidic grease and protein dirt. At its most, um, basic, opposites attract, and, when you're cleaning, you want to attract dirt.


THE NEUTRALS

Soap:  If you have to pick one cleaner, good old fashioned soap can do the trick. Generally plain soap's neutral or a mildly alkaline. Basic soap is an oil-based concoction made up of nifty molecules that attract water to dissolve dirt on one end and repel water to attract dirt on the other end.  Here's an academic explainer from Cal State that shows exactly what's going on and includes the names of the chemicals that are used as commercial soaps and detergents.

Baking soda: Some health nuts and cleaners like to tout baking soda's alkaline properties. But, as you can see on the chart above, it's a very mild alkaline. Coupled with it's mild abrasive quality, baking soda's near-neutral ph makes it a great all-purpose cleanser.

ACIDS

Vinegar: Vinegar, with a ph of 3, is a medium-strength acid, and it's pretty much the only one you need for cleaning house.Use acid to clean up soil and plant-based food dirt in the kitchen. It's also good for dissolving mineral deposits and rust on plumbing fixtures and surfaces. Vinegar's strong enough to etch grout, so it's not a good cleaner for tile, though a little vinegar water never hurt a wood, laminate or vinyl floor.

Lemon juice: If you shun commercial cleaning products, lemon juice is the strongest acid you're likely to have in your home. A lemon's supposed to be great for soap-scummy bathroom fixtures (do not use on silver) and can be used with oil to polish furniture. The major drawback of lemon juice is that it's perishable, so you won't find too many cleaners running around with lemons on their carts.


ALKALINES


Borax: This is another mild alkaline cleaner (ph of 8) that's especially good for deodorizing and getting at soap scum. Borax is supposed to be a pretty good disinfectant, but it must not be good enough to make that claim, because at least the 20 Mule Team brand shuns any suggestion that it kills germs. I'll have to dig into that some more before deciding it's good for that use.

Washing Soda: Washing soda's a pretty old-time laundry staple. Its ph is about 11, so it's pretty caustic and can be irritating if you get it on your skin. It's a good degreaser though, and the package says it's good for oily stains on clothes, though adding a little to the wash doesn't do much for old greasy stains. This stuff can stain aluminum and damage vinyl floors.

So that's how simple household chemicals work. Fancy commercial cleaning products work on the same principle, only manufacturers use iffy compounds and add preservatives, dyes and perfumes to make them last forever and give them their signature colors and smells. Want to read more about the nasties in ready-made cleaning products, look under the "No-Stink Cleaning" tab at www.JustCleanTuscaloosa.com.

The Elements of Clean

So, does all the bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo in the previous post really mean anything?

It sure does.

It means that there are guidelines out there for cleaning safely and effectively. It also means that they are difficult to find and not mandatory for general residential and commercial housekeeping -- so odds are your cleaning lady doesn't know anything about them.

For me personally, it means I had to look long and hard for help in putting together my materials and cleaning procedures.

And, for all the government agencies' focus on chemicals, my conclusion is that what a cleaner does is more important than what cleaners she uses.

Here are my main principles:

Know what you're doing.

Spray bottles can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

In my time working for other people, I have never once seen a cleaning service follow the OSHA hazard communication standard.  The norm in my experience is for cleaning companies to hand workers unlabeled spray bottles, tell them what they are for, and have them go at it. Now manufacturing and construction companies live in fear of OSHA. They sit every worker, whether he uses chemicals in his job or not, down and tell him where the Material Safety Data Sheets are, how to read them, and to throw out any substance that isn't properly labeled.

Following "the rules" for general housekeeping is important for two reasons. The main one is that virtually any chemical poses some hazard and can react badly with other materials. The old "never mix bleach and ammonia" is the main example. That creates deadly chloramine gas. Bleach and vinegar will give off plain chlorine, another dangerous gas. Here's a handy info sheet from the New Jersey Health Department that spells out some of the dangers of mixing household chemicals.

The other reason it's important to know what's in the bottle is for the safety of your stuff.  A degreaser can strip the finish off a floor. Spray furniture polish can turn the wax finish on wooden furniture to goop. Some chemical reactions can scratch or stain the surface they occur on. Bleach "stains" cannot be removed. Here is a cleaning company guide to basic cleaning chemical families and their health and property hazards. Another source for information about what cleaners are safe for your particular surfaces and furnishings is the original manufacturer. Most reliable domestic manufacturers will tell you what products are best, and many warranties specify that you follow those recommendations if you want to be covered.

One other thing I wasn't thinking of: Some cleaners can be harmful to your drain or septic system. Here's an InspectAPedia article that tells all about it.

These days, cleaning companies generally steer clear of hazardous, highly reactive chemicals like bleach, but, still, if your housekeeper says he's highly trained, he's not telling the truth if he can't tell you what cleaners he's using and what's in them.

Clean first.

 The iron rule of cleaning is to clean.

What I mean is that no housekeeping operation is going to be effective unless it's done to a clean surface.

The main use for this principle is for killing germs. The strongest hospital biocide can't do its job unless its applied to a clean surface. So when a janitor blows through your place spraying Lysol around and immediately wiping it off, he might be killing germs in the dirt he's removing, but he's not killing the germs on the actual surface he's wiping.

Here's is a nice magazine article by an author who actually talked to leading experts and includes information about less harmful homemade and commercial disinfectants at the end.

Plain old soap and water get rid of germs all by themselves, which is why just washing your hands with no special cleaners is effective. But for critical areas like toilets, sick rooms and kitchens, it's a good idea to follow up with a germ-killing chemical designed for that purpose.

Dwell on it

That janitor spraying Lysol around in the section above, he's also not giving the cleaner enough time to work. Although the disinfectant cleaner I have comes pretty close, there is no cleaning product that kills germs instantaneously on contact. Not even bleach.

The concept behind that is "dwell time,"  how long a chemical has to stay in contact with bugs to kill them dead. Yet another agency, the National Institutes of Health has a handy table of disinfectant types that includes dwell times, toxicity, effectiveness, brand names and other useful info. There are a couple of "one-step" cleaners mentioned on there, but the table notes that "best practices recommend cleaning first and then disinfecting for optimal efficiency."

Watch your cleaner sometime. If he doesn't go do something else for a few minutes after spraying disinfectant on your kitchen and bathroom surfaces, he's not going to actually be disinfecting them. (That's doubly true if he sprays the cleaner before wiping the dirt off.)

Keep germs in their place

And my last, but absolutely not least, principle of cleaning is technique, technique, technique.

Even if a housekeeper follows the directions on her cleaning chemicals to the letter, she's still not doing you any favors if she uses the same dirty rag and tools to clean your whole house ... and the house of her next client that day. (Shudder.)

I'm talking about cross contamination. You've probably heard that term before in talk about kitchen safety. When you get salmonella from your raw chicken legs on your cutting board and then cut the tomatoes for your raw salad on the same surface, that's cross-contamination.

In housekeeping, cross-contamination comes from dirty hands, dirty cleaning rags and dirty equipment. Dirt and germs also get around in dirty mop water and garbage can drips and spills.

Kitchens, hospitals and big cleaning companies often use color-coded equipment (red = bathroom/hazardous areas only) and disposable mops and rags to avoid spreading germs.

Cleaners like myself with more time and brains than money to spend on cleaning supplies follow two main rules: One, use clean rags and tools for every area and change mop and cleaning water (if used) frequently, and two, work from the cleanest areas to the dirtiest ones. It makes sense to do "clean" tasks like dusting and wiping mirrors before going on to do the germiest, highest-touch areas of a house. Most pros do the opposite, because the dirty areas are the most crucial and time-consuming, so it makes good business sense to get those done first so you can triage the rest. That's a big reason why I won't charge hourly rates. I'd rather find out the bathroom will add an hour to the end of a job than clean the rest of the house after scrubbing the toilet and taking out the trash. And doing the bathroom and kitchen last also keeps the sinks available for frequent hand-washing, another key to reducing cross-contamination.

Hours of searching for some official pronouncement that cleaning bathrooms last is the best way to do it has turned up nothing but one hotel group cleaning protocol and a  homemaker cleaning type advice article. So the pros generally tackle the dirtiest jobs first, but I just won't because it's gross.