I confess, I’m not a big fan of my Swiffer wet mop. I bought it when we lived in an apartment that had hardwood floors throughout, and I liked the idea of a quick clean, no buckets of water or disgusting mop sponge, and then the ease of throwing away a piece of paper with all the dirt in my house conveniently attached to it. I never really liked the “open window fresh” scent, but I did think my floors looked nice after a cleaning session.
Rumors about Swiffer being poisonous to household pets and children have been proven false. Well, sort of. P&G says the ingredients are safe, but I can’t seem to find out exactly what ingredients are in a Swiffer wet cloth. On close inspection of my box of “Swiffer wet” wipes, I found no list of ingredients, only information that it “doesn’t contain phosphates.” Okay, thanks. The “customer support” link on the Swiffer website doesn’t offer much more. Their answer to questions about Wet Jet and Wet Cloth ingredients is that the solutions are “made from perfume and water-soluble cleaning ingredients commonly found in cleaning products everywhere.” That’s really not too helpful either. Maybe some more digging around on their website, or perhaps a phone call to Procter & Gamble directly would provide me with some answers, but at the end of the day, I’m not sure I need to spread a chemical around my house that is either so scary or so simplistic that the company won’t list it directly on their product, or make it known on their website.
Either way, putting aside questions about chemical components for a moment, is Swiffer a more environmentally sound option than a conventional mop and bucket? Gianfranco Zaccai wants me to think so. In an article for Business Week Online, Zaccai said that a Swiffer mop triumphs over a conventional mop in environmental sustainability because it doesn’t require “gallons of hot water and great amounts of detergent every week in millions of homes around the world. The energy needed to heat that water and the environmental impact of dumping the detergent into the waste stream are terribly costly… Cleaning a floor with a Swiffer uses almost no water at all, and the only disposable waste is a sheet of paper and a few squirts of cleaning agent.”
Obviously, I can’t compare the “squirts of cleaning agent” with any floor detergent I might use to mop my floors because I don’t know what the cleaning agent IS exactly. However, does Zaccai have a point about the energy required to make hot water being worse for the environment than a “sheet of paper?”
I have no way of accurately comparing the environmental impact of those two things, but common sense tells me that if every household in this country used Swiffer, the disposal of those billions of sheets of paper (I used two every time I wanted to clean the floor in my not-that-big apartment) soaked with an unmentionable cleaning agent, the environmental damage would be far superior than if every household in this country used a reusable mop system. While I can’t compare the impact of washing a reusable mob head, or generating hot water, can it really be worse for the environment then the actual production, packaging, and shipping of all these sheets of paper all over the country? And if you consider their ride to a store near my house, the ride to my house, and then a ride to my local dump… they’re definitely taking their fair share of fossil fuel, no?
Of course, I have no doubt that Zaccai would probably like to see every household in America using a Swiffer. If you read the article closely, it doesn’t take much to see that he is president and CEO of the company that designed Swiffer for P&G. Hmm.
Well, I still have two boxes of wet-cloth refills left, and I guess in the interest of not letting things go to waste, I might as well use them up. Whatever the mystery chemical is in there, it hasn’t killed me (or the kids) yet. And, although I’ve been thinking for a while about buying a brand new, eco-friendly mop (if I could find one!), maybe I’ll consider rigging my own with my used Swiffer handle once I’m done with the wet wipes. Perhaps I could wrap an old t-shirt around it? If I mix up a simple baking soda and water solution, soak the t-shirt and wring out excess water so that it’s damp, wouldn’t that be somewhat equivalent to my own eco-friendly Swiffer? No more trucks shipping moist pads around the country, no more plastic containers to dispose of, no more sheets of detergent-soaked paper in the trash. Just a t-shirt that can be tossed in a regular laundry cycle along with some other household items that I’m going to be washing anyway.
I’ll give it a shot…
