Go to your supermarket and read the back labels on the bottles in the cleaning product aisle. You will see a few percent of a tongue-twister word, which is the active ingredient that does what the front label promises. The rest is “inert ingredients.” Inert for the promised performance, but potentially not inert for your health. One product I researched had 99% “inert ingredients,” half of which was trichloroethylene, a carcinogen. This stuff sits under your sinks and fumes potential risk.
Every now and then someone wakes up to a home product’s risk, BPA in plastics for example, and word gets around. But we keep forgetting these lessons – just because they sell it, doesn’t mean it’s safe. No one really keeps track. Groups like the FDA, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission have a really high threshold for taking action, so don’t depend on them. This is not a conspiracy theory, it’s a fact. Have your kitchen air quality tested and you will probably find some of the same chemicals for which EPA makes people clean up Superfund sites. EPA requires such cleanups, sometimes moving people out of nearby homes or supplying bottled water, until the cancer risk to nearby people is less than 1 in 1 million as determined by an exposure/risk assessment (there’s an EPA manual on how perform one). Similar or worse risks are likely to be in your home right now, even if you don’t live next to a Superfund site. Read the article on Product Safety in the Environment section of this website to learn more.
We can’t just hide in a treehouse, so what can be done? A simple step forward would be to get the labels to list those “inert ingredients.” But then people would need to become educated about the impact of all those chemicals and the actual exposures in their homes posed by their products. Sounds exhausting. A much more complicated (for a small group of experts) but potentially effective solution for all consumers would be to have a rating system for product safety. Like the “Energy 5-Star” system (who’s in charge of that, anyway, and what do those stars really mean?). Then, all other things being equal (e.g., products A and B clean the same), one might buy the one with the better safety rating. Alternatively, one might be willing to risk a worse safety rating for a better-performing product. The point is that a valid rating system would allow better-informed buying decisions. The ideal rating system would even let your smartphone scan a bar code for you to learn more while still in the supermarket – whether the exposure scenario used to make the rating is applicable to you, for example. This is another example of how Silicon Valley can improve our lives while Congress sleeps.