Okay, is a “green clean” really clean enough for my house? The arrival of my children has definitely ushered in a new age of vigilant label-reading on my part, and household cleansers are no exception. Watch any toddler put his mouth indiscriminately on a toy or toilet seat, and you’ll start to question whether or not it’s really clean enough too.
My dilemma, as a mom, is how to clean effectively both for the environment and for my family. This latest antibacterial movement has me on constant alert for evil germs that can only be removed with antibacterial soaps and cleansers. Numerous commercials would have me believe that simple scrubbing isn’t good enough if I’m not using antibacterial cleaner on every surface of my house (and body!). Forget any obvious hazard of licking the toilet bowl, my phone, doorknobs, counters, and remote controls are all carriers of viral plague. If I really want to keep my house clean and my kids safe from all the “bugs” lurking around here, antibacterial is the way to go, right?
Well, maybe not. While the jury is still be out on whether the use of antibacterial products in the home contributes to the drug-resistant bacteria phenomenon we’re seeing, there does seem to be a consensus among scientists and doctors that these products don’t offer any greater level of clean or germ protection than traditional cleaning methods. A 2004 study comparing families who used antibacterial products with families who used non-antibacterial products found no significant difference in the frequency of colds or other viral infectious diseases (*1). I don’t know about you, but somewhere over the past few years, I forgot something fairly simple that I learned in a high school science class: antibiotics (and antibacterial cleaners) have no effect against viruses.
So if there is no real asset to using antibacterial products (and their long-term effect and safety are still in question), and you can obtain a very respectable clean from natural products, why should I continue to spread unknown chemicals around my house? There is an ever-increasing supply of “organic” and “all natural” cleaning products on the market today, but to keep things easy and inexpensive, I’m currently going with just one book. It’s called, quite simply, “Clean,” by Michael de Jong. It’s small enough to fit discreetly on a little shelf in my kitchen, and it has become my bible for natural cleaning. The list of ingredients you need to clean, scour, scrub, disinfect, and deodorize your entire house contains only 5 items: borax, baking soda, lemon, salt, and white vinegar. The author has an index to simplify what can be cleaned by these various ingredients, as well as “recipes” in the book to show you how to mix your own natural cleaners to keep on hand. Inexpensive and all natural… it doesn’t get much easier than this.
Baking soda, lemon and vinegar are the basics for most home cleaning as you mentioned and not much more is required.
Do you remember the Scottish butcher who caused massive food poisoning a few years ago because he thought that anti bacterial meant that all germs would be killed. I can’t remember offhand where this was but at the time I thought “yeah right, the judge is really going to let you off for being naive mate” but is it possible that people really do get that confused from advertising and think if they scrub, scrub, scrub with every cleaning product available they will have a “safe home”.
I say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” nothing wrong with the natural cleaning products that our Grandmothers and Great grandmothers used for many years.