The theme of our mission to educate people about the toxins in their home is ‘The Real Dirt on Clean’. Many people don’t realize exactly what is in many of the popular brand personal care products and cleaning products that are in many homes. People use these products every day and generally feel that if a product is on a store shelf, it is safe. Unfortunately this is not true.
Here is one interesting fact. When you get that good, healthy feeling after just cleaning your house, it spoils the effort to find out that you have really just made your home dirtier.
The thing is, there are these chemicals and toxins in everyday cleaning products, and by using the products to clean, you are bringing them onto the surfaces of your house, into the air, and ultimately they are absorbed into your family’s bodies. Just as we would not let our kids play with toxic chemicals, we wouldn’t want a baby to crawl over a floor that’s just been wiped with them. They are more dangerous than the juice that was just there on the floor!
So, how dangerous are these toxins?
Over 90% of poison exposures happen at home.
Common bleach is the #1 household chemical involved in poisoning.
Organic pollutants, found in many common cleaners and even air fresheners, are 2 to 5 times higher inside your home than out.
A person who spends 15 minutes cleaning scale off shower walls could inhale three times the “acute one-hour exposure limit” for glycol ether-containing products set by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.
Common cleaners give off fumes that have been linked to increasing the risk of y our kids developing asthma, the most common serious chronic childhood disease.
1 in 13 school-aged children has asthma. Rates in children under five have increased more than 160% from 1980-1994.
Children are highly vulnerable to chemical toxicants. Pound for pound of body weight, children drink more water, eat more food, and breathe more air than adults to any toxicants that are present in water, food or air.
If your home is anything like the average U.S. home, you generate more than 20 pounds of household hazardous waste each year (the EPA designates toilet cleaners, tub and tile cleaners, oven cleaners, and bleach as hazardous waste).