GREEN Clean, Green Homes
Start with nontoxic cleaners

"I would get tired when I would clean my house," says Debra Lynn Dadd. It was 20 years ago, and Dadd was living in Marin, and nobody knew what was wrong with her. "I had insomnia, and I would faint when I would take a shower. The doctors weren't able to identify what it was, because it was all these random symptoms," she continues. "But one by one I was able to associate them with common household products."

Dadd stopped using chemical household cleaning products, and as soon as she made the switch, her symptoms disappeared. "It was very instantaneous for me," she says. "I learned that we are exposed to hundreds of toxic chemicals every day, and their synergistic effects in our bodies can be devastating."

This was in the early '80s, long before the current wave of nontoxic eco-friendly products hit the shelves, but this experience convinced Dadd that she needed to spread the word.

She self-published a book about nontoxic cleaning in 1982 and has since become a widely known expert on toxins in the home. Hailed as "The Queen of Green" by the New York Times, her sixth book

According to Dadd, the average household contains at least a dozen different toxic cleaning products, including cleaners for sinks, drains, windows, ovens and floors. The safety testing for these household chemicals is inadequate because it does not resemble the real world.

"When they test these chemicals in a laboratory, they test them in very isolated surroundings, but you and I are exposed to hundreds of chemicals every day," she says. "When you put them together, we have no idea what they're doing in our bodies."

"As I did research on these chemicals," Dadd continues, "I found that it wasn't just that I was sensitive to them, but that these were actually poisonous chemicals. You may not feel like you have any symptoms now, but when you breathe them in day after day, virtually every system in your body can be affected." Household cleaning products have been implicated in ailments ranging from asthma and cancer to birth defects and neurological damage.

Dadd says that the problem isn't just that the products themselves are toxic but that the home environment is not conducive to their safe use.

"If you look on the labels, most of them will say 'use in a well-ventilated area,'" she points out. "But people are just spraying them around in a small bathroom or using a mold cleaner in that little, tiny shower enclosure. That's not a well-ventilated area. A lot of times people are using the same chemicals which, when used in industrial settings, OSHA [Occupational Health and Safety Administration] regulations require people to wear respirators."

Indeed, professional housecleaners suffer even greater exposure to these chemicals than most of us: In 2003, a University of Michigan study found that cleaning products are one of the largest causes of work-related asthma.

For Bertha Naranjo this is more than an abstraction. For the first two years that she worked as a housecleaner, she says, "I felt bad. I became ill very often. I had a lot of headaches, a lot of colds -- I didn't have much strength. But it never occurred to me that this was because of the cleaning products."

Naranjo eventually stopped cleaning houses to care for her children, but four years ago she went back to her old low-wage profession. Housecleaning is a gateway to employment for recent immigrants, and Naranjo, who was born in California but grew up in Mexico and spent her formative years doing agricultural work rather than attending school, didn't have many other options.

But with the help of an Oakland-based organization called Women's Action to Gain Economic Security (WAGES), Naranjo became one of the founders of a South Bay housecleaning cooperative called Eco-Care. WAGES helps low-income women form worker-owned cleaning cooperatives by providing training, technical assistance and three years of management services until the cooperatives can become self-sustaining businesses.

Currently, three such cleaning cooperatives operate around the Bay Area -- in the South Bay, Peninsula and East Bay -- with plans for a fourth, possibly in San Francisco, next year. Thirty-five women are members of the cooperatives, serving more than 700 clients. Because WAGES' mission is to help women build sustainable livelihoods, the organization promotes the use of nontoxic cleaning materials and practices.

"Household cleaning products are intended for individual homeowners or residents who clean their house maybe once a week," says Hilary Abell, WAGES' executive director.

"Women who clean houses professionally are doing maybe four or five houses a day. And they clean five or six, sometimes seven days a week. So these products that are meant for occasional use are being used constantly. Every woman who walks through the door at WAGES, if she's made a living cleaning houses for any period of time, has noticed a health impact ranging from something minor like a headache or a little bit of difficulty breathing to something more dramatic like skin rashes or trouble concentrating and memory loss."

For Bertha Naranjo, who got involved to improve her economic condition, the health benefits are a bonus. "Since I've been using the less-toxic cleaners, I haven't been sick at all," she says. "I saw personally how important it is to use nontoxic products."

Debra Lynn Dadd says this kind of personal experience is the biggest motivator for changing our chemical habits. "As children we learned how to clean with chlorine bleach and ammonia and Spic And Span and all that stuff," she says. "[But] back in our great-grandmother's time, there was no such thing as any kind of toxic cleaning products, except maybe a little ammonia sometimes. For the most part, they just cleaned with soap and water."

"We always look for the least-toxic product available on the market that will do the job well," says WAGES' Abell. "That ranges from things that are so benign they're edible, to some of the common natural products that you see at a natural foods store these days. We use Seventh Generation dishwashing liquid as our multipurpose cleaning solution."

"And the results are great," adds Naranjo. "It's totally clean. I try to clean the client's home the same way I would clean my own -- I like to see their satisfaction at how clean their houses are, and it's a bonus for us and for them to know we are not leaving behind toxins."

Dadd, who helped WAGES develop the criteria they use in evaluating cleaning products, says that because cleaning products aren't required to list their ingredients, choosing safe ones can be tricky. But she adds that there are some simple steps anyone can take to avoid the worst poisons.

"The first thing is to read the label," she says. "It's a process of elimination: If it says that it's toxic, eliminate it. Then you can't just choose something because it says 'natural' or 'nontoxic' on the label -- you have to actually look at the ingredients and see what they're putting in them. When you're in doubt you can always look at the Material Safety Data Sheet."

The key is doing your research. "It's very difficult to look at a product on a shelf and make an instantaneous decision," warns Dadd, who adds that "the best products come from the companies that were formed specifically to make these natural products -- usually they tell you exactly what's in them, just voluntarily."

Dadd cautions that giving up on chemical cleaning products can take a little getting used to. "There are some differences in technique," she says. "The basic idea behind a chemical cleaning product is that you just put it on and it does the work. With a natural cleaning product you may need to scrub a little. You just need to relearn what to use and how to use it, but it's a very simple thing."

Abell says this kind of additional knowledge translates into overall better quality results. "For a professional cleaning company our women really have a high level of training," she says. "They have to achieve really high-quality, detailed results without being able to just spray something on and leave it and have the dirt come off. So it's a combination of a little bit more elbow grease and also more specialized knowledge."

Naranjo says she feels sorry for housecleaners -- often immigrant women who don't speak English or have much experience with household chemicals -- who don't have this knowledge. "It's really sad because these women just want to work, but they never bargained for these kinds of conditions. Sometimes you have to work in a space where you can't open a window or get any ventilation -- you just keep breathing that stuff and soaking yourself in it." Three million people nationwide work as professional cleaners of one kind or another.

And if being unable to open a window at work sounds familiar, Dadd cautions that office environments also need to be reexamined. "I encourage people to speak up at work, because offices can be maintained in nontoxic ways as well," she says. "Employers need to be conscientious. Part of providing a livable workspace is to have it be nontoxic. And it comes back to them: It leads to less absenteeism, better production and fewer sick days."

"One of the exciting things about this work for me," says Abell, "is that it so clearly proves that there is not a contradiction between promoting workers' rights and promoting environmentally sustainable businesses or practices."

She notes that the rates charged by WAGES' member cooperatives are competitive in the industry, while still providing worker-owners with double the pay plus benefits that are unheard-of among the franchise cleaning companies (Molly Maid, Merry Maids and the like, which funnel franchise fees to the corporate owners). In 2004, the use of nontoxic cleaners spared WAGES cooperatives' members exposure to some 3,000 pounds of toxic products -- nearly 100 pounds for each member.

Recent research has found that household chemicals are present even in newborn babies. "It's not even like a baby is born pristine and then it has toxic exposure," says Dadd, aghast. "Babies are being born already compromised, and it's because of the chemicals that are in their mother's bodies, what their mothers are being exposed to in the home." (Abell says many of the WAGES cooperatives' clients are pregnant or have small children in the home and prefer the cooperatives' work for this reason.)

"And it doesn't stop there," adds Dadd. "Those toxic chemicals are going into the environment, and birds and insects and especially aquatic life are affected. Toxic chemicals are bad news all the way around."

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  You need to read all of this. Not all green clean product are true green.  What you need to know.

   The term "GREEN"  AUTOMATICALLY conjures up in one's mind an image of "outdoors" -or- being derived from "NATURE". GREEN GRASS, GREEN LEAVES, GREEN FOREST...ALL  of these images reflect natural elements which are vibrant and renewable . Hopefully, the HISTORY and PERSPECTIVE of "GREEN CLEANING" stated above has made a compelling argument supported by facts and reference points that "GREENING" YOUR CLEANING means #1 ) using renewable resources such as bio-based citrus, seed, and vegetables ; and #2 ) Avoiding non-renewable resources such as petroleum -or-hydrocarbon-based materials . These points are clearly the intent of the "U.S. Department of the Interiors" Environmental Attributes ( as stated above ) with the 3 MOST RECOGNIZABLE AND EASILY ACKNOWLEDGED ATTRIBUTES BEING :