Upscale Bohemian Living

     For starters it is alot cheaper to clean with natural products than store bought mixed ones.  Cleaning with natural products also goes hand in hand with simplifing your life as you have a few muti-purpose staples instead of a closet full of expensive commericial ones to wade through each time you want to clean an item.   I should say each time you “need” to clean, instead of “want” because I doubt very few people out there wake up in the morning all antsy to get to the cleaning.  And then, of course, by using natural products you are also safe guarding your health and the environment.

  The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the average person spends as much as 90% of their time indoors, yet in a study conducted in 1989 they determined that indoor air is more polluted and toxic than outside air.   A five year study by the EPA showed the average American home has chemical contaminantion levels 70 times greater than outdoor air.  Unfortunately, even if you purchase a product with the label “non-toxic” that is sometimes nothing more than an advertising word with very little, if any, scientific data to back it up. 

Why use natural products such as baking soda, vinegar, salt, lemon juice etc. (all of which you can eat!)  to make your own cleaning recipies?  Doesn’t the Government restrict which chemicals are used in cleaning products and allow only safe ones?  Unfortunately, complete data on the human health and environmental effects of chemicals are available for only about 10% of the registered chemicals, which means that about 90 % of chemicals (around 69,900)  are available for companies to choose from, although these chemicals could have some damaging effect on humans or the environment since full data is not yet available on them.   A good example of this is DDT which was thought to be safe when it first came out, but was later proved to be quite damaging.  In addition, two major chemical testing labs were found guilty of providing falsified research used to support registration of chemicals with the EPA  so data is not always reliable (Industrial Bio-Test in 1983, and Craven Labs in 1992).

Even though you clean your home with commerical products designed to make your house look clean and germ free,  you have often actually turned your home into a toxic dumpsite by leaving hazardous waste in the air and on the floor and home furnishings.   Some chemicals used in commonly used cleaning products produce toxic fumes that dissipate into the air, which is called “off-gassing”, and that toxic air remains trapped inside your home .  These chemicals can be fatal or cause developmental, brain, or nervous system damage, with small children and pets being more susceptible to these dangers.  So, when you use a product with toxic chemicals in it when you clean, each time you or your loved one  takes a breath some of the chemicals can be absorbed  into the bloodstream, plus the skin acts as a sponge to the chemical fumes.   For example, Lysol spray is a registered pesticide, so in effect you are spraying a pesticide about your house to kill germs!  

 So what happens when you buy a product labeled “non-toxic”?  Can you trust the label?  No you can’t. In effect, companies can include chemicals in their products that may be very dangerous since it takes a long time to find out and prove that a particular chemical is toxic.  Plus there is no federal regulatory definition for the word non-toxic, therefore the word is basically just an advertising word.  So, why risk damaging your health, your loved ones health, your pets health, and the damage to the environment when natural products are available with which to clean?