A green home is good enough to eat

Rob Grand, owner of Grassroots store on Danforth Ave., says that with just a few natural products everyone can make their own cleaning solutions.

I cleaned my house with salad dressing the other day.

The recipe for all-natural wood cleaner and polish called for nothing but olive oil and vinegar.

It felt bizarre – like wearing dental floss as jewellery. But it worked beautifully. The console in the front hall still gleams like a church pew.

I didn't want to eat it, despite my predilection for salad. If I did, that would be okay.

Which is the whole point of green cleaning.

"There are over one million poisonings a year in North America, and 60 per cent are children under six, most of whom have eaten household cleaners," says Rob Grand, the owner of the green retail store Grassroots.

Getting rid of all the chemical cleaners in my house was my next step in lightening my ecological footprint. True, it's not as big a step as, say, ditching my car. But it's easier. And it makes a difference – not just to my health but to the environment.

Cleaning products and services are the leading source of toxic air pollution in our homes, according to the Consumers Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, published by the U.S.-based non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.

They're also causing water pollution. Hormone-disrupting chemicals from antibacterial soaps and cleaning agents – among other things – were recently found in San Francisco Bay during a year-long study by the Environmental Working Group, an American non-profit agency.

One of the chemicals, triclosan, has been shown to feminize fish.

My first step was to sit down on the floor beneath my sink, and actually read all the labels on the cleaning products I use regularly: Orange Glo Wood Polish and Conditioner; No Name Toilet Bowl Cleaner; Bissell Carpet Cleaner; Comet. ... What I found were a lot of corroded hand symbols, a few skull and crossbones and many instructions to phone the Poison Control Centre if the product was swallowed.

Then I went to the laundry room: Tide, Javex Bleach, and my beloved Spray N' Wash stain remover.

To my surprise, none had any ingredients listed. That's because Health Canada doesn't require it. It operates under the assumption that chemicals in cleaning products are at such low doses, they aren't harmful, says Mae Burrows, the executive director of the Labour Environmental Alliance Society, a Vancouver group leading the "right-to-know" campaign to reverse that.

They list the known carcinogenic and toxic chemicals in some brand-name products on their website. Tilex Total Bathroom Multipurpose Cleaner, for instance, contains 2-Butoxyethanol – a reproductive toxin the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says causes birth defects in animals.

And the toxin is just one of eight chemicals they were looking for. There are thousands. The external relations manager for fabric and home care at Procter & Gamble, which makes Tide and Cheer, told The New York Times there are up to 400 raw ingredients in detergent. Many may be safe. We don't know, because in most cases, long-term studies on the health and environmental impacts of these chemicals have not been done.

"We don't know what's a safe dose of carcinogen. But we do know it's an epidemic. More than one in three Canadians get cancer," says Burrows. "With most products, you can find a cost comparative and equally-effective alternative. So why use it if you're unsure?'

But aren't the chemicals what make them clean well? While I was committed to the cause, I wasn't convinced of the outcome.

To ensure I didn't relapse, I scooped up all 20 bottles and dropped them off at the hazardous waste depot. Then I went to Grassroots, where Grand gave me a quick lesson on green cleaning.

His store is a paragon of environmental virtue. There is LED lighting and no plastic packaging. Cashiers bundle your items in reused plastic bags. And there are shelves of green cleaning products – all with ingredient lists that include things like corn starch and coco-betaine (from coconuts). They all biodegrade in water within 28 days. At trade shows, the inventors of one new brand drink their products, he said.

But, I didn't need any of them, Grand said, pulling out his own cleaning bucket. In it were the few basic cleaning essentials: baking soda, washing soda, vinegar, liquid soap, a whole lemon, a bottle of club soda and borax – a mineral which disinfects, deodorizes and inhibits mould growth. Add a dash of essential lemon or grapefruit oil, and I'd have the makings for everything from bathroom tile spray to toilet bowl cleaner.

I grabbed a copy of Annie Berthold-Bond's Clean and Green: The Complete Guide to Nontoxic and Environmentally Safe Housekeeping. In total, it cost me $60. Then I went home and got cracking.

I was surprised at how easy it really was, once I got over the hurdle of stirring up cleaning products for each specific job like I was preparing courses for a dinner party.

Grand's patented cream cleanser worked really well in my kitchen sink and on the counter. The night after dumping a cup of borax in my toilet, the bowl scrubbed clean easily. And the e-cloths I picked up, which advertised cleaning windows with nothing but water, worked amazingly. I plan on giving them to everyone I know for Christmas.

But there were a few weak spots.

No matter how much I scrubbed with the bath tile spray I'd concocted, the lime scales on my shower doors remained. And the first two natural stain removers I made only managed to turn the brown blobs on my daughter's white dress to a rust-orange. I then applied some premade all-natural stain-remover. The stains are still there.

That could be a problem, as I can't convince my 1-year-old to stop spilling food on her clothes.

But it's one I'll have to live with.

"It's a bit like dandelions on your lawn," said Dr. Kapil Khatter, a family doctor and the pollution policy adviser for Toronto-based Environmental Defence. "If you don't want to use chemical pesticides, you are going to have a few."

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