If You Knew How Dangerous Green Cleaning Products Were, You'd Probably Go Back to Soap and Water

They're hiding under your sink, deep in the basement and out in your garage. They seem to be multiplying and most of them are green, for gosh sakes!

They are cleaning products. We have one for every conceivable job: floors, walls, dishes, laundry, windows, bathroom porcelain and ceramic tiles, wooden decks, cement surfaces, silverware, one for car paint and another for the chrome, and on and on.

Whatever happened to just plain soap? Well, it seems it wasn't fast enough for our busy lives. And these new cleaners certainly are fast. Just spray and wipe or swish with a mop and the job is done.

If you want really fast general cleaning products, commercial ones like Formula 409, Simple Green and Windex clean faster than any soap and water could. This is because they contain small amounts, usually in the range of 2-6 percent, of some members of the most powerful grease-cutting class of chemicals known: the "glycol ethers."

Many people have heard of glycols, a class of chemicals used in antifreeze solutions in your car's radiator. Others may remember that ethers were used as anesthetics in the early 1900s. But the glycol ethers we will discuss are not at all like either glycols or ethers. Glycol ethers are in a class of their own.

Everyone has been exposed to the glycol ethers. You can't possibly have escaped. They are in paints, varnishes, stains, inks, brake fluids, perfumes, cosmetics, and, of course, a vast number of cleaning products. They mix with water and many water-based cleaners and paints contain them.

Heavy overexposure to the glycol ethers can cause anemia, intoxication (like alcohol), and irritation of the eyes and nose. In laboratory animals, low-level exposure to some of the glycol ethers has been shown to cause birth defects and can damage a male's sperm and testicles. Some of the common glycol ethers haven't been studied for reproductive hazards or cancer. But there is enough data for the New Jersey Department of health to state on its fact sheet that the most commonly used glycol ether (2-butoxyethanol) "may be a carcinogen in humans since it has been shown to cause liver cancer in animals." I agree.

You are exposed to the glycol ethers when you inhale them as the cleaner is used. If the cleaner does not also have a lot of perfumes or odorants, you know you are exposed because you can smell the chemical. If there are strong perfumes, the odor of the glycol ethers can be covered so that the water-based cleaner appears to have no chemicals solvents in it at all.

While you are inhaling them, you also may be exposed in another way as well. Most glycol ethers can silently penetrate your skin and enter your bloodstream without altering or damaging your skin, causing pain, or giving you any other warning.

If that were not enough, the glycol ethers also go through natural rubber gloves and many types of plastic gloves without changing their appearance. So while you are cleaning, you are being exposed both by inhaling the vapors as the cleaner evaporates and by exposure through your skin even if you are wearing gloves. These are reasons why even the 2-6 percent of these chemicals commonly in cleaning products can be significant.

The glycol ethers are all related to each other in a single chemical class. There are hundreds of them. We will look only at the first four members of the glycol ether class.

The first two glycol ethers (2-methoxy- and 2-ethoxy-ethanol) are so toxic that it is rare to see them in our products today. But if you were cleaning and doing household painting and repairs as I was from the 1970s to the early 1990s, these highly toxic glycol ethers were in most of the cleaning and paint products then. If you were working as an artist or teaching art during this period of time, those glycol ethers were in our products in large amounts. Some of the new "safer" water-based paints and printmaking inks contained glycol ethers in amounts as high as 30 percent.