NO MORE MYSTERY Danielle Hughes, center, holds a party at her brokerage firm to make cleaning products because she thinks store-bought ones triggered her asthma and eczema.


Raiding the Pantry to Add Sparkle and Shine

The New York Times
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: May 22, 2008

?MICHELLE, would you like to head up the creamy soft-scrub team??

With that call to arms, the women in Laura Gosa?s kitchen in Jersey City fell to, blending the ingredients spread out on her counters like so many blasts from Grandma?s preindustrial past: baking soda, borax, Castile soap, lemon oil, vinegar, glycerin and other staples of the all-natural armamentarium.

These women weren?t interested in buying green products; this was strictly a make-your-own approach. It was one of more than 100 such parties held since late March in various parts of the country by Women?s Voices for the Earth, an environmental group based in Missoula, Mont., that just began the program and has another 100 parties planned. The group made headlines last year with a report that common household cleaners contained obscure chemicals ? mostly in small amounts as fragrances or surfactants ? that it considered unsafe.

While it is deeply serious about persuading people to consider alternatives to chemical-laden cleaning products, the parties are not merely dutiful. At another recent one in the Wall Street conference room of Divine Capital Markets, a brokerage firm, the firm?s founder, Danielle F. Hughes, served ?Windex martinis,? mixed from Ketel One vodka and blue Gatorade.

Ms. Hughes said she is wary of detergents and cleaning products because she thinks they triggered her past attacks of asthma and eczema. But she is hardly suspicious of everything made by conglomerates.

?Heck, I?m in the stock market, I don?t want everybody to stop buying everything,? she said. ?But we need to lobby companies to say, Hey, tell us what?s in it.?

As fear of global warming has given new clout to a tattered environmental movement, and as companies like Clorox have responded by bringing out ?green? product lines, groups like Women?s Voices have responded by saying there?s no need to pay $4.99 for a bottle of cleaner with ingredients the company won?t name when you can make your own with well-known ingredients for pennies.

The organization sends out packets to help get the party started, including recipe cards and a DVD describing its findings. Ms. Hughes signed up because her roommate at the University of Massachusetts, Dori Gilels, is now the executive director of Women?s Voices. Ms. Gosa, a fund-raiser for a human rights group, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, has been making her own cleaning products for years, saying she prefers ingredients she knows to the unpronounceable chemicals in commercial cleaners.

At the party in Ms. Gosa?s apartment, Michelle Williams-Burrows, a skin-care therapist, said she had mixed many of the same ingredients into her lotions, but had never thought of cleaning her bathroom with them.

?My kids come in and see me making skin-care products, and they say, ?Is that something to eat? Or are we going to have to wear it?? I tell them, ?You can do both!? ?

Recipes for homemade cleaning products have been available in books and magazines for years, but they suddenly seem to be everywhere.

They?re even becoming the stuff of entertainment. The BBC America show, ?How Clean Is Your House,? shown on cable and YouTube, features ?dirt detectives? Aggie MacKenzie and Kim Woodburn, who clean up the nauseatingly filthy houses of people who have volunteered to air their dirty linen on air. The appeal of the show, besides the pleasure of realizing that your bathroom is spotless compared to some, is that the duo recall Patsy and Eddy of ?Absolutely Fabulous,? but with sponges instead of flutes of Bolly, brushing aside cobwebs and owners? explanations of why they haven?t tidied up for 11 years or how they hadn?t noticed their seven cockatoos? guano piles.

In line with today?s focus on natural, Aggie and Kim patiently teach tricks like de-blackening a window of a wood-burning stove with a mix of fire ash and water, or scrubbing a filthy tub with half a grapefruit heaped with salt.

Fashions evolve in cleaners just as in hemlines, albeit more slowly. In the early 20th century, convenience and quality assurance ruled: buying soap flakes was easier than boiling your own beef fat and ashes, and Ivory Snow was 99 and 44/100 percent pure.

Subsequent attraction to plastic bottles, aerosol sprays, pumps, foams, bleaches and enzymes brought buyers into the late 20th century, when baby boomers turned to germ-killing products. Those products have lost some allure as questions arose: whether they promote antibiotic resistance, whether their antibiotics can combine with chlorinated water to make carcinogens, whether soap and water works just as well ? and whether some germs are good, since research suggests that farm children who roll in pig manure may be less likely to develop allergies than Boerum Hill Bugaboo jockeys whose fingers are Purelled hourly.

Experts in cleaning and toxicology say some safety principles cannot be forgotten.

The first is that whatever health risk a child may face from fumes pales in comparison to the danger of poisoning. Many cleaning chemicals can kill or destroy tissues if swallowed; even mild soaps cause diarrhea.

It is crucial to keep cleaning products in cabinets with childproof latches or out of reach on high shelves, and never to make a product that resembles juice or soda. (Or anything else edible: more than one Web site commented on the unfortunate resemblance between green canisters of Kraft Parmesan cheese and Comet cleanser.)

The second principle is to remember that plenty of the things Grandma cleaned with were and are dangerous.

Lye cleans ovens and acid opens drains; both can blind if splashed in the eyes. Bleach and ammonia can damage lungs. Solvents can explode. Rust removers can remove flesh. Avoid them, or use gloves and protect your eyes.

Careless mixing can also be hazardous. For example, bleach mixed with ammonia produces dangerous chloramine gas. Bleach mixed with acids (including mere vinegar, which contains acetic acid) can produce chlorine gas, used in the trenches in World War I.

It?s not always obvious what a product contains. Some scouring powders contain bleach.

Acids are in some toilet cleaners and rust removers.

Ammonia is often in glass cleaners, but it?s also in cat boxes or diaper pails in the form of dried urine.

Beyond those sorts of chemicals begins the gray zone that Women?s Voices is addressing.

Makers of cleaning products are required to put words like Danger or Poison on labels if they contain obviously dangerous ingredients. But they are not required to list all ingredients and usually do not. On material safety data sheets filed with the federal government they may use vague terms like ?fragrance,? ?surfactant? or ?disinfectant.?

Women?s Voices wrote to many manufacturers, asking them to specify which chemicals were in their products.

Most declined, saying their formulas were secret, although all said their products were safe. Women?s Voices argues that some chemicals, particularly those found in air fresheners and fabric softeners, such as phthalates, monoethanolamine and quaternary ammonium compounds, have been linked to low sperm counts, birth weights and other problems when large doses are fed to laboratory animals, and that janitors and others exposed through constant use at industrial-strength applications have higher rates of asthma.

However, there is no scientific proof that the typical home exposure from off-the-shelf cleaning is risky.

?We?d love to have that data, but that kind of research just hasn?t been done,? said Alexandra Gorman Scranton, science director for Women?s Voices. ?That?s where our concerns come in. We don?t know the effects they could have over a lifetime.?

Urvashi Rangan, a Consumers Union toxicologist, is not as mistrustful of detergent makers as Women?s Voice is, but agreed that more research was needed.

?The way the message is sometimes construed ? Danger! Danger! ? I don?t think we can raise the red flags that high,? she said. ?But a lot of these chemicals have never been fully tested for safety.?

?If you?re doing a lot of work, and you?re not in a well-ventilated area ? we don?t know what the combinations of all these in a day can do,? she added. ?Certainly some can be respiratory irritants or cause eye sensitivity, especially if someone is sensitive.?

In any case, the most sensible protection is the obvious one: open the window.