CLEANING WITHOUT CHEMICALS

Learning about environmentally friendly cleaning products without harmful acids and pollutants from the author of Clean House, Clean Planet.

June/July 1997
By Lisa Degliantoni 
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by Lisa Degliantoni

Eco-Friendly Company Puts Environment Before Profit

Karen Logan has decided to clean up cleaning, specifically cleaning (house. She wants you to throw out your cleaning products and make your own. "Life on the Planet,"' which sells and packages eco-friendly, non-toxic cleaning products and a new book, Clean House, Clean Planet, published by Simon & Schuster, provides recipes and research for ways to avoid dangerous chemicals found in most household cleaning products.

Environment Before Profit

Logan's previous research and volunteer work at Fred Segal ecology research center in Los Angeles has exposed her to frightening information about chemicals, especially the chemicals in cleaning products:

Extremely dangerous hydrofluoric acid, which can penetrate right through flesh to the bone without any warning signs of pain, is a completely legal chemical to include in a commercially sold rust remover.
Companies are not required to list all the ingredients or their concentrations on the labels.
In 1989, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) came to the conclusion that indoor air carries a higher risk for personal exposure to toxic chemicals than outdoor air. Many of these "unfriendly chemicals" are coming from cleaning products.

According to Logan, these "unfriendly chemicals" and "cleaning products" can be found in many major brandname products such as Pine-Sol, Tilex, X-14, Endust, Raid, Black Flag, Old English Wood Polish, Comet, Bon Ami, Lysol Disinfectant Spray, Spic and Span, and Soft Scrub. Cleansers may contain anything from a mere bit of bleach to large doses of ethanol. Side effects can vary from nausea and vomiting to chemical pneumonia.

New-found information and a baby on the way helped Logan decide to make her own cleaning products out of nontoxic ingredients such as club soda, olive oil, liquid soap, and baking soda. She then decided to store these eco-friendly products in recycled plastic containers with personally designed labels that list ingredients and an effectiveness rating. It took exactly six months for this project to turn into a company and a new book. Logan hopes the public will be as responsive as her publishers.

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