Cleaning Wood Cabinets and Floors

GoodGuide has a review of Method Wood for Good Spray. They give it an 8.7 which is a very good rating. They rate it better than alternatives such as Murphy Oil Soap (although they only have a rating for the Murphy Oil Soap Multi Use with Orange Oil) which gets a 5.6 which is decent, but not as good as the Method product. What brings down the Murphy cleaner is it's health 4.0 rating. This is the same rating as Bona and a few others get. Compared to the health rating of 8.7 for Method Wood for Good Spray, these other products score pretty low.

Method also sells a floor cleaner called Method O-Mop Wood for Good Floor Cleaner. It gets a slightly lower GoodGuide health rating of 6.0 which drops it's overall rating to 7.9. What happened? Why did it's health rating drop like that? GoodGuide answers the question by pointing out that O-Mop includes Propylene Glycol Monomethyl Ether. Although it raises a medium level of concern, Method
Ecos, and Seventh Generation all use it in some of their products. And all three of these companies are trying to produce greener products. The lower rated products like the Murphy Oil Soap have a whole list of ingredients that raise a "high level of health concern."

I think I'm ready to switch. What about you?

What makes a cleaning product "eco-friendly"?

There are a lot of commercial eco-friendly cleaning products and online recipes for green cleaners out there. But a truly sustainable product needs to have more than "baking soda" listed on the ingredients. There are other things you need to watch out for. Here's some questions you might want to ask yourself:

Where do the items/ingredients come from?

Just because something is non-toxic when used in your home does not mean that it's production is also environmentally friendly. 

Is the manufacturer socially responsible?

In other words, does the manufacturer exploit the workers who mine/collect/make the product? 

How is the product packaged?

What I mean here is that sometimes the product inside the package is "green" but that green product is wrapped in multiple layers of junk. If you are buying a cleaning solution look for the concentrated form. A concentrate may be equivalent to 10, 20, or even 40 bottles of "ready to use" sprays. I have a cleaner that I use that can make 64 gallons of cleaner from one gallon of concentrate. That means I can do a lot of cleaning and I only have one bottle that I have to recycle.

What do they mean by "Biodegradable"?

Is the whole item biodegradable or only part of it? And how long does it really take to break down? If the product is ultimately flushed down the toilet or down the sink what kinds of effects will it have "down stream" before it breaks down. And after it breaks down, what's left? Are the byproducts toxic or harmful in any way?

Why is the manufacturer calling the product "Green"?

Sometimes green products are made of a little recycled material, but not very much. Or it is recycled, but not biodegradable so after you use it it's just going to end up in a landfill for a thousand years. Or one of the ingredients is environmentally friendly, but there are also toxic ingredients in it.

Buying green cleaning products is kind of like buying food. Just because some cookies are advertised as "Low Fat" doesn't make them healthy if they have extra sugar to compensate for the lower fat content. For food to be healthy it needs to be more than just "low fat."

Get the right information
So finding out all about all this is a difficult task. Don't despair. There is help out there.

See this video interview with Scot Case of terrachoice.com
GoodGuide.com is also a very good place to find information.

Trying to green clean that shower? Consumer Reports says...

GreenerChoices.org, the eco-minded version of Consumer Reports. They test as report on supposedly "green" alternatives.

Cleaning up the shower? GreenerChoices says:  "Most 'green' shower cleaners haven’t wowed us. We found one decent choice by Green Works, called Green Works Natural Bathroom Cleaner, but it wasn’t great at removing mildew. Do-it-yourself cleaning recipes might be a better way to go."

Their recipe for a tub and tile cleaner.

Mix 1 2/3 cup baking soda, 1/2 cup liquid soap, and 1/2 cup water. Then, as the last step, add 2 tablespoons vinegar (if you add the vinegar too early it will react with the baking soda). Immediately apply, wipe, and scrub.

This is a variation on the common recipe for a tub and tile cleaner for your bathroom.

Other Recipes

EarthEasy recommends:

For simple cleaning, rub in baking soda with a damp sponge and rinse with fresh water. For tougher jobs, wipe surfaces with vinegar first and follow with baking soda as a scouring powder. (Vinegar can break down tile grout, so use sparingly.)

Green Joyment breaks it into two parts: 

Combine 2 cups of baking soda with enough water to make a smooth thick paste. Apply the paste to the tub or tile and let sit for 20-30 minutes. Scrub off with a soft rag in a circular motion. After the paste is removed, spray the tub or tile with a 50/50-vinegar and water rinse. The rinse will remove any residue and disinfect the area as well.

Someone on Associated Content has a little different take on it:

1 1/2 cups of white vinegar (only use white vinegar it works much better than apple cider or other flavored vinegars); 1 1/2 cups water; 3/4 cup of hydrogen peroxide (comes in a brown bottle you may already have some in your first aid kit). If you would like you can also add 40 to 50 drops of essential oil, for this recipe and oil that is naturally antiseptic such as lavender, orange, grapefruit or lemon will give the recipe added disinfecting power.

What are these recipes really telling us?
In your shower/tub you will basically have three kinds of cleaning to do: hard water spots, soap scum, and mold/mildew. What does this really amount to? Let's have a closer look at each problem.

Hard Water Spots: This is also known as limescale. The minerals in your water remain behind after the water evaporates off the tile and glass door. Lime is an alkaline substance (above 7 on the pH scale), so the best way to attack it is with something acidic. But hard water is also hard so you will need something abrasive to scrub with.

• Vinegar is a mildly acidic (below 7 on the pH scale), so it makes an excellent choice to attack the limescale. Lemon juice would also work, but I think white vinegar is a little more economical. However, lemon juice is actually more acidic, so if you have a tough problem you might want to go with the lemon or even lime juice.  Another way to getting more work out of your cleaner is to let it sit longer before wiping it up. So try leaving the vinegar/lemon juice to sit there for a five or ten minutes before wiping it up. 
• Baking Soda is a mild abrasive, so it should work well with the vinegar to give it some scrubbing power. However, baking soda is an alkaline and will neutralize the vinegar. You can see the reaction taking place as it bubbles up. Something like Bon Ami or Borax is a little more abrasive (and alkaline) and could be used instead of the baking soda. (But be careful with Bon Ami on glass shower doors.) All you need to do is make sure you don't let the vinegar and baking soda sit around mixed together for too long. 
• If I were using this vinegar/baking soda combination I would wipe or spray the vinegar around the shower/tub and let it sit for a few minutes. Then put some baking soda on a sponge (a little liquid soap can also help) and start to scrub. But be careful: vinegar is acidic and if you use it too much it might eventually eat away at the tile grout and caulking.

Soap Scum: Basically, soap scum, like limescale, is above 7 on the pH scale, so the same thing we said above about limescale applies here. Vinegar and baking soda make a good combination, along with some elbow grease.

Mold/Mildew: Tackling the mildew problem is a little more difficult. Vinegar, because it's an acid, can kill mildew but it's not always completely effective. Many sites will recommend using essential oils and tea tree oil because of their disinfectant qualities. But I would stay away from them for reasons mentioned here. It seems to me that a better solution is to use hydrogen peroxide along with the vinegar. However, like the vinegar and baking soda, I would not combine them beforehand.

My Recipe
So my final recommendation would be along these lines:

1. Put some white vinegar in a spray bottle and spray your shower with it.
2. Wait five minutes.
3. Put some hydrogen peroxide in a separate spray bottle and spray your shower with that too.
4. Wait another five minutes.
5. Mix together in a jar: one part baking soda and two parts borax.
6. Put a few drops of liquid soap on a sponge and sprinkle the baking soda/borax generously on the sponge then start to scrub your shower in a circular motion. Use some water if you need more moisture.
7. Rinse your shower out with water and wipe out any residue with a clean rag/sponge.

President's Cancer Panel

I regularly read Nicholas D. Kristof's New York Times essays. They are informative and interesting. Recently he had an essay on the President's Cancer Panel. This is a great article, mostly because he has given the panel's report a much wider audience than it otherwise would have had. I've noticed mentions to the report on LinkedIn as well as by Seventh Generation.

So what's the report about? You can Read the Report yourself. Although the report is 240 pages, there is a nice executive summary that's worth taking a look at. Basically, as Kristof point out, the new thing about this report is that they essentially support many of the same things the organic food movement has been advocating. They also suggest testing for radon (you can buy a detector here: Safety Siren Pro Series HS71512 3 Radon Gas Detector, or just get a test kit here: Pro-Lab RA100 Household Radon Gas Test Kit), and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.

The report states: “Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.” This exactly what many organic and green advocates have been complaining about for years.

The report also says that "Children Are at Special Risk for Cancer Due to Environmental Contaminants and Should be Protected." This is one reason that many women first become interested in organic products and green cleaning products when they get pregnant. We know this is true, but it's more than just lead paint that we need to be worried about.

The biggest problem, however, is that these 80,000 chemicals mix in all kinds of different ways that it's impossible to study thoroughly. Even products that are safe in isolation may not be when combined with other chemicals.

However, now the American Cancer Society has come out in criticism of the report. The New York Times covers this side of the story too. The American Cancer Society is right to point out that there is not enough hard evidence for linking a lot of cancers to environmental causes.

However, my mother died of cancer and the doctors never told us what caused the cancer. Sure, there's no conclusive evidence that it was caused by this or that combination of chemicals, but that seems to me to be the point that the President's Cancer Panel is trying to make. We don't know, but we should be trying to find out.

Even though we are not just going to stop using these 80,000 chemicals, we can start to do something now. We know that there are dangerous chemicals in our household cleaners. We also know that there are safer alternatives: Method, Seventh Generation, etc. Besides these commercial products, with a little searching we can find ways to making our own green cleaning products out of common household items such as baking soda, vinegar, salt, and hydrogen peroxide.

Mixing it up with Bleach

When I was in the Marine Corps we had to clean, clean, clean all the time. It's what got me into the cleaning business. But when I was in boot camp one of my fellow recruits was taken to the hospital because he mixed bleach with ammonia. Boy did we get a big lecture after that.

When you mix bleach with ammonia you get a very dangerous gas. That's easy, don't mix bleach with ammonia and you should be alright. Right? Well, it's not always that easy. Bleach (sodium hypochlorite or calcium hypochlorite) is found as an ingredient in some household cleaners other than the bleach you might have in the laundry room. And it's the same way with Ammonia. Ammonia is found in glass cleaners, some interior and exterior paints, and -- drum roll please -- urine. So when you're cleaning our the kitty's litter box or the diaper pail you might want to stay away from bleach. And if you are cleaning your shower you might be tempted to use window cleaner (ammonia?) for the shower door and tile cleaner (bleach?) for the tiles. This can get you into trouble. If you are cleaning your shower, first do the tiles, rinse the shower out, then clean the door.

Or better yet, use a non-chlorine bleach (I usually look for one that uses hydrogen peroxide) or other green alternatives for your tile cleaner and your glass cleaner. Hydrogen peroxide can help you keep mold away. For scrubbing the tile and grout you can just use some baking soda and water. If you need more power to get the grout clean you can spray some vinegar before scrubbing with the baking soda (but be careful because vinegar is acidic and can eat away at the caulking around your tub/shower and it might eat away at your grout too). You can buy baking soda in bulk for cleaning (but don't bake with the bulk stuff as it's not food grade).

A little Bon Ami might also do a nice job on the tile, but you might not want to use it on the shower door as it may scratch glass. There's some controversy about the scratching. Bon Ami has feldspar which has a Moh's hardness of 6 which is the same as glass. But I think it's a good cleaner and I like to use it when I need a little more scrubbing power than baking soda can give.

Removing a Frosting Stain

My daughter got a nice white dress for her birthday, tried it on, and then had some birthday cake and immediately spilled blue frosting on the dress. Since frosting is a fat I figured that the best way to remove the stain was to use an alkaline agent. So I mixed a tablespoon of Oxo Brite in some cold water. Oxo Brite is mostly made of sodium percorbonate and sodium carbonate.
When you mix sodium percarbonate into water it breaks down into hydrogen peroxide and sodium carbonate. And since Oxo Brite already has sodium carbonate in it, the pH is about 11 which makes it pretty alkaline. Hydrogen peroxide by itself is slightly acidic, so while it's a good cleaner it wouldn't work as well on the blue frosting. The high alkalinity together with the hydrogen peroxide combines to make a nice bleaching agent.

So I soaked the stained part of the dress in my mix and five minutes later you couldn't even tell that anything happened. I rinsed the dress and then later washed it. So a birthday disaster was averted. Of course, since this has a bleaching effect you would need to check for color fastness before you tried this with anything but a white garment. It will also work for stains on carpet or furniture, but again, check for color fastness.

See also:
Organic Chemistry Portal
Ecos.com

Tea Tree Oil: An Evaluation

When you look around the web for green cleaning or eco-friendly cleaning products, especially the home-made kinds, you will sometimes come across Tea Tree Oil. This is not to be confused with the tea you drink. Tea Tree Oil comes from a different plant altogether. Tea Tree Oil comes from a tree in Australia known as melaleuca alternifolia.

Warning: Tea Tree Oil, which can be purchased in health food stores or online, is toxic and should never be swallowed. Even though you can buy it as a mouthwash (e.g. DESERT ESSENCE, Tea Tree Oil Mouthwash Spearmint - 8 fl oz) you should not even swallow the mouthwash version. And it probably should not be put in the ears because it may cause hearing loss. [See these warnings by the Mayo Clinic]

The great thing about tea tree oil is that it has antimicrobial properties. People claim that it can be used to treat a variety of medical conditions including acne (DDF Benzoyl Peroxide Gel 5% with Tea Tree Oil 2 oz (59 ml)), dandruff (Neutral ph Tea Tree Oil Shampoo 16 fl oz (474 ml) Liquid), warts, athletes foot (FungaSoap Pedifix Liquid with Tea Tree oil - 6 oz.), and many more. But you have to be careful, even when you apply it topically to your skin, because some people have adverse reactions to it, especially if you use the undiluted oil.

The Mayo Clinic's conclusion is that for every human trial that's been conducted "there is a lack of definitive available evidence for the use of tea tree oil in any of these conditions, and further study is warranted."

However, what I'm interested in is should it be used as a disinfectant or to kill mold and mildew? Should I add it to my cleaning solutions? I'm not really sure that there is sufficient scientific evidence to warrant it's use in cleaning products either. Here's my reasoning:

1. First, there is reasonable evidence that tea tree oil does have antimicrobial properties. This fact is not in dispute.

2. However, at the low levels that it is used in cleaning solutions, it can create microbial resistance.

3. In the long run, creating resistent strains of dangerous microbes is more detrimental to humans.

Therefore, for now I'm not going to use tea tree oil in my household cleaning products.

The study where I got this information can be found here: http://jac.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/59/1/125

Cleaning a Hardwood Floor with Tea

You might be surprised to find that a lot of people recommend cleaning hardwood floors with plain black tea. This actually works because of the tannic acid in the tea. It's simple, cheap, green, and effective.

The steps are fairly simple:

• Make a pot of tea with two tea bags. 
• A quart of water should be just about right. 
• You don't have to use high quality tea, the cheap stuff will work just fine. 
• But don't use the instant stuff. 
• Let the tea cool down until it's warm or at room temperature. 
• You can discard the tea bags. 
• Clean the floor the way you normally would, but using tea instead of your normal cleaning solution.

Remember, wood floors don't like lots of water and that goes for tea water too.

If you are like me you will probably want to use a damp sponge mop, but the best way to clean a wood floor is to get down on your hands and knees and scrub it with a damp cloth. Make sure to rinse the rag out with clean water periodically and then dip it in the tea and squeeze it out before proceeding.

Hydrogen Peroxide

In my last post we talked about two of the most popular household green cleaning agents: baking soda and vinegar. Today I want to talk a little about another popular cleaner that you might have at home. Hydrogen peroxide's formula looks a lot like the formula for water. Water is H₂O and hydrogen peroxide is H₂O₂. That means that water has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom while hydrogen peroxide has two hydrogen atoms and two oxygen atoms. In fact, when two hydrogen peroxide molecules breaks down they turn into two water molecules and one oxygen molecule. The formula looks like this: 2 H₂O₂ → 2 H₂O + O_2. 

You can't get more environmentally friendly than water and oxygen. But that does not necessarily mean that hydrogen peroxide is safe. In fact, before it breaks down it can be quite harmful. It is an oxidizing and bleaching agent. Hydrogen peroxide is a stronger oxidizer than chlorine.

If you've ever bought non-chlorine bleach to do your laundry then you have probably used hydrogen peroxide as a cleaning agent. In most grocery stores you can buy hydrogen peroxide in that familiar brown bottle with the white cap. Normally you will find it with just 3% hydrogen peroxide. But if you look around you can find it in 12% solution (Hydrogen Peroxide 12% 16 Ounces) or even 30% (Hydrogen Peroxide 30% (ACS) [ 1 Ea.]) or more.

The normal bottle of 3% is often recommended as a mouthwash or you can buy it formulated and marketed as a mouthwash (Mouthwash-Hydrogen Peroxide - 16 oz. - Liquid). I would recommend that you never use a solution of more than 3% as a mouthwash or for washing your teeth. You can make a toothpaste out of it if you mix it with baking soda to make a paste. It apparently works as a teeth whitener. I would recommend, however, that you also brush with a toothpaste with floride in it after you use the hydrogen peroxide. This is because hydrogen peroxide's oxidizing process can weaken the enamel on your teeth. Fluorine has just the opposite chemical effect. You can read more about this in the Wikipedia article Oxidizing agent.

There's a nice web site that talks extensively about using hydrogen peroxide as a cleaner. Amazingly enough, it's called http://www.using-hydrogen-peroxide.com/. You can get a lot more information from them than I am going to cover in this post. For that matter, you can do your own Google search and find a number of articles on it. The main reason I want to address post my own article on it is to point out that a hydrogen peroxide based cleaner is what I use for most of my own cleaning. I use a professional concentrated cleaner called Clean By Peroxy. I buy mine at a janitorial supply in Chattanooga called Advanced Paper Company, but you can order it over the internet at places like Green Chemical Solutions. It seems expensive but it's highly concentrated, so a little goes a long way. Clean By Peroxy is Green Seal certified.

But there are also plenty of other hydrogen peroxide based cleaners that you can probably get at your local grocery store or hardware store. You can usually spot them because they will have the word OXY in the name somewhere. Or you can just stick with that bottle of hydrogen peroxide antiseptic in your bathroom.

Since hydrogen peroxide is a bleaching agent you can use it for whitening and brightening most of the same things you might use bleach for. You can use it as a general cleanser for your kitchen, it can get stains out of carpets or off floors or out of your clothes. Of couse, you will always want to check it first on an inconspicuous spot to make sure the item you are applying it to will not be discolored by the hydrogen peroxide.

The only environmental reservation I have about hydrogen peroxide is in its manufacture. I'm not sure if the process of making it has any harmful environmental impact. If I find out more about this I'll give you an update. Or if anyone who reads this article knows more about the issue please let me know.

Two Popular Green Cleaning Supplies

When you read books about environmentally friendly cleaning techniques or search the web, you often come across two popular products: Vinegar and Baking Soda. You may already have both of these common household products in your house.

On the pH scale, baking soda is on the opposite side of vinegar. Vinegar is slightly acidic while baking soda is a base. Water is considered neutral with a pH of 7, vinegar is acidic with a pH of 2.4 and baking soda is on the other side of the scale at 8.4. So as you can see, while neither vinegar nor baking soda are strong, they do have different qualities.

VINEGAR: Since vinegar is slightly acidic, this means it is good for getting rid of hard water spots in your shower, but there are some things you would not want to clean with an acid. You need to make sure you know when and where to spray it. You might also find the smell to be somewhat of a problem. I used to spray straight white distilled vinegar in my shower and my wife would complain that the bathroom smelled like ketchup. Although the smell will go away after a few hours, if you buy a little lemon oil and add a few drops to the vinegar you might find the smell less offensive.

BAKING SODA: You've probably heard that baking soda is good for getting rid of smells in the refrigerator. It can also be used in other places where smells accumulate. Anything with a high pH is also a whitening agent. By comparison, bleach has a pH of about 13. This means that while it can be used to get stains out of your carpet or off your counter, you should be careful and test it first in an inconspicuous spot because it could also discolor that nice rug of yours.

Since vinegar smells bad and baking soda gets rid of bad smells, couldn't you just combine them and get a super cleaning agent that smells nice? Well, not really. The cleaning power of each of these substances has to do with their pH. But if you combine them the pH becomes neutral, meaning that it would clean just like water does. This isn't bad, but it might not be what you are looking for. However, there are a few instances where you might want to combine them. You see, if you put baking soda in vinegar it will bubble up. Some people recommend pouring baking soda into a clogged drain and then put vinegar into it. The bubbling might help break up the clog. Next time you have a clog you might give it a try. Although I haven't had much success with this tip, it's definitely worth trying before you go dumping lye into your drain.