It's not REALLY clean if it makes your family sick

I guess I can say it until I'm blue in the face, but I'll say it again. We're intimately connected to our environment. Everything we put into our body, we are putting into our environment. Everything we put into our environment, we're putting into our body.

There's no way to escape this basic fact of nature.

It's true of toxic chemicals, from chemotherapy and household cleaning products (link to Household Products Database by the US National Institutes of Health) to the jet fuel used to get an airplane from one place to another. No matter how far away something is, it's in your environment -- indoor or outdoor -- and it will find you.

The flip side of this is that it doesn't matter who puts it into the environment. If industry does it, it still ends up in our bodies and homes. Neighbors. Friends, parents, children, government, someone on the other side of the planet. We are directly and indirectly responsible for each other's health and well-being.


So, let's start with an easy example. You use toxic household cleaners, and you clean your house. You wash some tile and bathroom cleaner down the sink, toilet, tub drain. It ends up in your cesspool, septic tank, etc. It leaches into the ground, even though it goes through a filtration process and could theoretically biodegrade. These toxic cleansers are not biodegradable, so they leech into the ground, and into the groundwater.

Many of us drink from this groundwater. Or at the very least, we wash our bodies with it. Our skin is our largest organ, and it DOES absorb chemicals. We think of it as a barrier, but it's a barrier that will allow things in. The same chemicals from cleaners with huge warnings on their labels are now in our bathwater. Maybe we drink that water. Maybe we cook with it. It probably isn't the chemicals I put into the water that I wash with. It's probably the neighbor's chemicals. Or someone across town. Or someone in the mountains. The basic point is that it's now in my water supply.

If we can convince our neighbors to change to natural biodegradable cleaning fluids, this wouldn't happen, or, assuming we can't convert everyone, at the very least it would be possible to lessen the impact of these chemicals on our bodies.


But what if we're cleaning with those chemicals. We may be poisoning our neighbors' groundwater, and we're certainly poisoning ourselves (link to a page by the National Organization for Women Foundation - stay at home moms & dads, and babies, beware!). Every spray, sprits, stream or the use of any product with fumes adds to the air pollutants in our homes. We breathe that air. Opening windows only helps a little, the fumes are there, we breathe them in, and it causes us to become sick -- either quickly, or a little at a time over a span of years.

What if we could change it? And still be clean and sanitary? Please join me in changing this. Once you've made the switch, tell your neighbors -- the life you may be saving could be your own. By purchasing environmentally-friendly, biodegradable, so safe you can let your baby and pets crawl on the floor, cleaning products you'll be making a change that makes sense (and cents, but I'll talk about packaging another time).