Cleaning Products

As I may or may not have mentioned in my previous posts, I have been cleaning houses around the Bozeman area for a little more than three years. Most of our clients are wealthy stay at home mothers that do not have time to keep up with cleaning apparently because they do too much yoga or Zen meditation.

Anyways, most of these peoples houses are filled with all organic products and foods (or at least they would like to think that because the label says it). They have that weird brown super thin toilet paper and paper towels made from recycled whatever. They also have the extra bin you get for recycling.

My cleaning company I used to clean for promoted "green cleaning." Our products were supposed to be green. One product I know was harmful that we used was Comet with extra bleach. I found on treehugger.com that Comet contains 146 different chemicals some of which are: formaldehyde, chloroform, benzene, and toluene. Some of the chemicals are thought to cause cancer, asthma and reproductive disorders. Even if we aren't sure what the contaminates can do, I don't think many of our "green" want us to use a cleaner that has the chemical to preserve dead animals in it.

The next cleaner that most are clients are attracted to us because we use it is Simply Green. These are the same people though that have "organic" everything all over all of their food and probably don't realize that just because they slapped a label on that claims to be organic, doesn't mean that the product is 100% organic, in fact according to the NSF only 95% has to be organic to be organic. And it says contains organic materials only 70% has to be organic.
Simply Green is not as "green" as their name would imply. It contains 2-butoxyethonal which is a irritant and may damage red blood cells. Some members of this chemical family are banned by the European Union.
With that said it does work very well at removing grease from a stove top. Not sure that any "green" product could do that.

There are so many cleaning products on the market that are very toxic. With that, there are many blogs out there talking about how terrible all these cleaners are for you. But how are you suppose to clean 10 year old soap scum off a shower wall or super cooked on grease off a stove without a toxic cleaner?