Cleaning and Health. Part 1.

Cleaning and Health

 The most precious thing we have is our health.  Anyone who suffers from a chronic health challenge can tell you how much their health problems impact their ability to enjoy life and affect their life plans and goals.  I know from personal experience (I am 71 years old) that when even minor things go wrong (like pulling a hamstring) my whole outlook on life seems to diminish and I feel sorry for myself because of what I have to put up with and what I am prevented from doing.

On the other hand, we often consider the task of cleaning to be a somewhat trivial concern. Even though I am kind of persnickety about things being clean, if I don’t get around to it, it’s not a big deal.  Everybody knows I’m a good person (I hope!) but I’m busy, so sometimes I can’t do the cleaning tasks I had planned to do.  And, when I do them, I want to do them in the quickest and most efficient manner possible, because I don’t want to waste a lot of time on them. They are, fundamentally, nuisance tasks. So, I used to use the quickest means of cleaning, which usually meant the strongest cleaning products I could find to make the job as quick and easy as possible.

But, having transitioned from discussing one of the most important things in life to a relatively trivial aspect of life, what if I told you that cleaning and health are related, and often not in a positive fashion? Here are some examples of that relationship:

• Women who work at home have a 54% higher death rate from cancer than women working away from the home. 54% higher death rate? Good grief! That is surprising!! But, a 15 year study concluded that the higher death rate is directly linked to the use of toxic household chemicals in the home (Source: Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons)

 Wow! That is hard to believe except that Columbia University is one of the great research universities in the world, so I tend to trust their findings. And it turns out that there are other negative relationships between cleaning products and health:

• Household cleaners were the third largest category of substances associated with calls to poison control centers, and over half of those calls were regarding an incident involving children six years old or younger (Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

OK, sure, everybody knows that it is dangerous for children to use household chemicals, but presumably it is safe for adults, right? I mean, after all, they sell this stuff in the grocery store.  It turns out that these products are often not very safe at all:

• Most common store-bought cleaning products (the kind that we typically store under kitchen or bathroom sinks or in the garage) contain ingredients that are considered hazardous waste (Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

OMG! Maybe I should just stop cleaning altogether. Is there anything I can use to clean safely instead of using these dangerous chemicals to clean my house? Well, it turns out that there is. Plain, clean, safe water.

Water? I often use water with these chemical cleaners to help me clean my house. But it turns out that you can use just water, without the dangerous and harmful chemicals, and achieve even better, easier, and less expensive cleaning results. And in a fashion that is much better for the environment, also. The secret to accomplishing all of this is an incredible, highly engineered cleaning product called e-cloth.

E-cloth is a microfiber cloth which is made from the highest quality polyester and polyamide (nylon) raw material. The microfibers fashioned from these raw materials are 1000 times finer than cotton fibers and 1/200 the diameter of a human hair. They utilize the smallest fibers in the world that can be made by man, and they are especially designed, engineered and fabricated to provide maximum cleaning and drying power.

During production, polyester fibers are split into eight pie shaped filaments and polyamide fibers are split into an axle with eight spokes. These filaments are combined to form the fibers which are made into e-cloth products which have as many as 3.1 million fiber strands per square inch of cloth. Each of these cloth cleaning products has nearly one-half billion fiber strands. So, e-cloth takes high quality raw materials and makes them into the smallest fibers used as fabric in the world, resulting in an extraordinary product that helps you to achieve perfect cleaning and polishing results.

E-cloth fibers are so small but strong, that using just water, they break up, lift, lock in and clean deep down into the tiniest grooves and crevices. The small, strong fibers cut through and lift (like millions of tiny hands grabbing everything off a surface) all dirt, grime, dust and bacteria which get locked into the fibers. Polyamide fibers (20% of the fibers) are negatively charged electrically and so they attract water which is positively charged. Polyester fibers (80% of the fibers) are positively charged and attract any type of grease, grime, dirt and oil which is negatively charged. The fibers in e-cloth act like millions of super strong tiny magnets making all water and grime adhere to the fibers.  Surfaces are left totally streak-free, smear-free, lint-free, polished, and with no chemical residue.

So, as we have been discussing, there are some important, “big picture” health issues associated with the mundane task of cleaning the house. In my next blog I will discuss some additional examples of how these e-cloth products can help safeguard your health and the health of your entire family.