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As I continue the journey to lessen my environmental impact and remove toxins from my home and business environment, I continue to learn. Today, I wanted to share some of what I’m finding about bleach.

When I started to bring “green” cleaning products into my home several years ago, one of the items on the “remove” list was bleach. In many articles I read, bleach was mentioned as a cleaner you should replace. When I used bleach, I knew the smell was strong and so I immediately jumped onto the bandwagon that if the smell is that bad it must not be good for the health of my family.

Then, a couple weeks ago, at the Good and Green conference in Chicago, I had the opportunity to hear Bill Morrissey from Clorox speak. The topic of his presentation was focused on the changes that a large, traditional company is making on the path to sustainability. However, during the presentation he spoke of the myths surrounding bleach in the green community. Here were some of the key points he made:

  1. During product use, 95-98% of household bleach breaks down to salt & water
  2. Household bleach is non-toxic – it has the same toxicity as household plants
  3. Bleach can be an irritant to the skin and respiratory system

Since I’ve gotten back from the conference, I’ve done a bit of searching on the topic online. My goal here is not to push you to one point of view or another on using bleach, but rather provide you with the links and knowledge if have gained in the search. From there, the cleaning decisions are up to you!

So, that said, the first website I would have you take a look at is www.factsaboutbleach.com. This website is managed by Clorox and addresses some of the key misconceptions that can be found around the web.

One of the items that stuck out to me in reading the content on the site was that bleach both cleans and disinfects. Now, I know this should have been obvious to me all along, but I guess it clicked in my head when I read the article on the site. With this fact in my mind, I started searching the web for alternatives to bleach. What I found were a lot of options that would clean surfaces. What I didn’t find were alternatives that also communicated the ability to disinfect. There may be options out there and I’m sure I’ll get e-mails if there are, but to the “browsing consumer” they were not obvious on the websites I checked which to me indicates an issue with the product messaging.

The component I’m still troubled with after my investigation is I can’t figure out the smell of bleach. What is it that causes the irritant? Here is what I think I figured out – the 3-5% of the bleach that is not salt and water is sodium hypochlorite. This is the component of “bleach” that makes it a disinfectant and at the same time produces the irritants. For information on sodium hypochlorite, you can check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hypochlorite.

Many people will chose an alternative to bleach because of the irritations – skin or respiratory. And, while there are a lot of products out there that will effectively clean, they will not be able to disinfect the surfaces. I did find this site that has some alternative (natural) disinfectant ideas – http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/22/1/Earth-friendly-disinfectant.html.

As I said earlier, I’m not trying to push you one way or another on the use of bleach in your home or business. I was defiantly making decisions in the cleaning space with some misconceptions in my mind. What I hope I’ve done with this post is raise your awareness of the pros and cons of use. Happy cleaning!