Cleaning is a chore, but a clean home is a healthy home to live in. And, one of the first way to start to eliminate toxins in your home is making your own healthy household cleaning products.
In this two-part series, I’m covering why healthy household cleaning products help to make your home healthier, how to make your own household cleaning solutions, and in the following article, how to find and buy all-natural cleaning products locally in Metropolitan Washington DC area.
So, let’s begin with the harmful stuff in your household cleaners before we move along to making your own homemade versions.
Problems With Cleaning Products, Generally
Most cleaning products are tested for safety and toxicity levels. So, we all imagine that they’re good to use at home. Until you think about, these tests only show them used separately and how they affect the general population. Once you start combining these cleaning products in your home and, say, catch a cold/flu, how do you know those cleaning agents are not at toxic levels for you and your family? This is where a knowledge of what chemicals are in normal household cleaning products, and why making your own healthy household cleaning products can prove beneficial to your health and wellness.
Starting in the living room, you can typically find the chemical agents ammonium hydroxide, napthalene and perchloroethylene (a dry cleaning agent). When used, the fumes from these cleaners are known to cause disorientation, dizziness, nausea, among other symptoms, and they can cause cancer and liver damage. You should never breathe in such fumes and make sure to ventilate your home when they cleaners have been used until the toxins in the air dissipate.
Then there are wood furniture polishes, many of which contain petroleum distillates, along with ammonia, naphtha, nitrobenzene and phenol. Together, this chemical cocktail may irritate eyes, skin, throat and lungs, and can cause you to be nauseous and induce vomiting.
Air fresheners can do the same things as furniture polishes when used in closed spaces because of the chemicals such as aerosol propellants, formaldehyde, more of those petroleum distillates and p-dichlorobenzenes. Sadly, these can cause cancer and neurological damage, in addition to being highly flammable.
We continue on to the kitchen, where cleaning is most important because the surfaces and tools you use touch your food. Dishwashing detergents contain phosphates that can burn your skin or even worse if swallowed. If you, a family member or pet do swallow any such detergents, immediately call your poison control hotline.
Antibacterial surface cleaners in the kitchen usually contain surfactants and pesticides. Window and glass cleaners contain ammonia and isopropanol. All of these can cause irritation to the eyes, breathing (nose, throat, windpipe and lunges), and skin. Make sure to wear gloves and well-ventilate any areas where you might be using them.
Next, we visit the bathroom where we need to keep it clean from regular use, but also where we clean our bodies. Lurking in toilet cleaners are sodium hypoclhlorite, hydrochloric acid and/or bleach. These can all irritate eyes, skin and throat. When these chemical cleaning agents are mixed with other cleaners, they produce toxic gas that can harm your breathing severely, so beware never to combine them.
Beyond the toilet are the bathtub and vanity/sink surface cleaners, usually designed to kill mold and mildew. These contain fungicides, which again can seriously irritate eyes, skin, throat, and should never ben swallowed. Make sure to wear gloves and vent the area after each use.
Finally, we enter the laundry room, where you clean the clothes that sit on your and your family’s skin, day in and day out. Laundry detergents contain enzyme-based ingredients (usually called anionic, cationic and non-ionic on labels), which help to break up dirts and stains. Be careful to avoid ingesting any of these products as they can cause mild irritation to the eyes and skin all the way up to nausea, vomiting, convulsions and even induce a coma. It’s documented that high exposure levels of these detergents causes asthma.
Bleach is a category of cleaners by themselves and as you can imagine all types of bleach are very toxic to breathe in and should certainly never be ingested, and never mixed with other cleaning agents.
So, even in this brief overview of just some of the chemicals in household cleaning products, they can be extremely unsafe for the general population. And, that doesn’t include those with allergies or other sensitivities, along with pet companions in the home that may be more affected by the chemicals.
As you can see, perhaps making your own healthy household cleaning products can do your home and body good!
Cleaning Products That You Can Make From Natural Ingredients
Several bloggers have put together fantastic and thorough resources on making your own healthy household cleaning products, so here is a roundup of those posts and videos.
“Make Your Own Cleaning Products”
After extensive research, The Green Parent blogger Leanne Patrick assembled recipes for dishwashing liquid, surface cleaner, toilet cleaner, window cleaner and multipurpose cleaner.
“11 Homemade Natural Cleaning Products”
DIY Recipes & Uses blogger Ellen Gans put together a list of household cleaning products by task, which is really helpful. Where she mentions using dish soap, you can swap that out for all-natural liquid dish soap.
“The Ultimate Guide to Homemade All-Natural Cleaning Recipes”
Keeper of the Home is last on this list of resources, but probably the best and most comprehensive list of recipes for making your own healthy household cleaning products. The guide is structured by areas of the home and are all all-natural ingredients.
Now that you know how toxic household cleaning products can be, I hope you’ll consider adding some all-natural cleaning products to your home’s cleaning toolkit. And, you can quickly glance through this list of resources to get the ingredients needed in making your own healthy household cleaning products. In the next article, we’ll discuss where you can buy some household and other all-natural, healthy products in and around the Washington DC area.
Let me know in the comments if you’ve made your healthy household cleaning products and how they’re working for you!