Backbone > Life in the Balance
Cleaning Green: Housekeeping that
Doesn't Cost the Earth
By Susan Piperato; photo by Keith Ferris

Nothing disappears. If there is a mantra for practicing sustainability, that’s it. Of course, the fact that you can’t ever really get rid of any substance completely is often the first thing to be forgotten when it comes to housekeeping. If you’re like me, and constantly on the go, cleaning house sometimes has to take a backseat to family and work responsibilities. It’s only natural that, by necessity, professionals and/or parents take care of whatever is vital to family life and the job first, and worry about comparatively more minor things like dusting, vacuuming, wiping and scrubbing later. After all, you can survive with an unmopped floor and windows that don’t pass the streak test, but not without making a deadline at work, or attending a civic committee or board meeting, or ensuring that your kids complete their homework.

So, not surprisingly, when it comes to keeping house, people who otherwise attempt to live “green” often eschew their sustainability principles in favor of saving time. They use whatever cleansers are at hand, cost least and work the fastest, regardless of what chemicals they may contain. Once the dirt is out of sight, it’s out of mind, allowing us to move on to doing what’s seemingly more important for family, community and profession. But what we often don’t realize is that while the mess is gone, the cleansers we used to get rid of it remain—not only in the home but in the local environment, the larger, global picture, and our own bodies.

Meet two local sustainability practitioners: Ann LaGoy, proprietor of the Home Assistance Cleaning Service as well as Clearly Natural Cleaning Products, based in Fishkill; and Rhinebeck’s Annie Berthold-Bond, a renowned authority on environmentally friendly housekeeping and gardening, and the author of several books on the subject, including Clean and Green, considered to be the bible of the field. They’ve both discovered the hard way just how extreme and long-term the effects of toxic chemicals on quality of life can be. Each endured the experience of being poisoned by chemicals and not only regained her health, but subsequently devoted their lives to the promotion of natural housekeeping.

When LaGoy, a former medical staffing director in Washington, D.C. and an active volunteer for local environmental and animal rescue organizations, founded her cleaning service in 1996, she started out using “regular commercial cleaners,” she said, “like lots of Lysol.” That is, until one day when she was at a client’s house, routinely cleaning a shower stall, and was overcome by chemical fumes. “You know how you hop in and spray cleaner all over? Well, I was spraying ammonia, and before that my client had used bleach, but I didn’t know that,” she recalled. “It immediately fumed, and it was scary. This had never happened to me before. I couldn’t breathe. I had to go outside. My lungs were burning for a couple of days afterwards.”

Although LaGoy realized then that chemical cleansers “have really serious health repercussions and actually put my staff and me at greater risk,” the complete turning point in her career didn’t come immediately. After the fuming experience, she was careful to work only in well-ventilated areas, and to check with her clients about previously used products, but she didn’t explore alternative, nontoxic cleansers until a few years ago after receiving Karyn Siegel Maier’s The Naturally Clean Home: 101 Safe and Easy Herbal Formulas for Nontoxic Cleansers (Workman Publishing Company, 1999) as a Christmas gift. The book features a table of commonly used chemical ingredients and their effects on health and impacts on the environment, along with several recipes for cleansers and reading it, says LaGoy, changed her life. Now, she says, she knows much better. “Furniture polish is a petrochemical product with the potential to cause liver damage,” she said. “And just being exposed to laundry detergent dulls the sinuses, because it contains some chemical meant to take odors away.”

“I actually started experimenting with the recipes in the book and changing them around, adding in essential oils which are naturally antiseptic (orange), antimicrobial (lavender) or antifungal (tea tree and patchouli),” she said. “If you use natural ingredients, it doesn’t fume or let off some awful smell. And I realized I could have any ‘flavor’ I wanted to. My staff (of six) was wonderful. They don’t have any vested interest in the products, except obviously, their health, but even when I introduced the products to them, their reaction was, ‘Oh, okay, we’ll try it.’ I didn’t sell anything until we’d been using them for awhile. Now the natural products are all we use, except that we do have a couple of diehard clients who say, ‘I really like that chemical smell.’”

LaGoy has been bottling and selling her cleaning products since last fall. Although she wanted to package them in bottles made from recycled glass and plastic, she found that bottling companies will not consider using recycled materials unless they receive an order for more than 50,000 containers. “There are very few packagers using recycled materials in the country, and I literally spoke with every single one,” she said. “Finally I asked one of them why they’re so reserved about this, and the answer was that it’s not more expensive, it’s just not standard, so therefore it’s messy.” Also, because of epa regulations, LaGoy is unable to use label any of her products “disinfectant” without having them tested on animals, which she refuses to do. But she isn’t giving up. “I’d love nothing more than to take things a step further,” she says, and use recycled bottles and test her products on humans or refer to previous epa tests on the separate ingredients, so she is currently researching alternative means of both packaging and testing.

In the meantime, LaGoy’s all-natural cleansers are taking off. “What really excites me, besides the financial intake enabling me to make a living from doing what interests me, is that what this allows me to do, giving me the chance to follow my own interests in environmental issues by offering people an alternative to chemicals.” She says they particularly appeal to parents, because “all the ingredients can be ingested — baking soda, powdered milk, vinegar...the strongest thing in them is hydrogen peroxide and that’s used to gargle!” Also, the products do not cause problems for people with sensitive skin. “You can use the strongest one, Velvet Hammer, on anything, even wash dishes in it, and it can’t bother your skin,” she said.

Berthold-Bond converted to 100 percent nontoxic housekeeping 23 years ago. She had no choice after being poisoned by pesticides. “I got so sick and was so sensitized that I became a bubble case,” she said. “I couldn’t even have a newspaper in my house for three years. So by hook or by crook, I had to learn how to eliminate all toxic ingredients from my house. I mean, I still had to clean my oven! I’m still chemically sensitive—I can’t even apply nail polish, but I wouldn’t want to. But there hasn’t been a toxic ingredient in my house for 23 years, and it’s as clean now as any working mother’s—chaos at times, and wonderful at other times.”

Through her work as a producer, editor, and writer at Care2.com’s Healthy Living channels, Berthold-Bond continues to crusade for nontoxic housekeeping, and says that her converts are not only many, but diverse in the positive effects they site. “It has a huge impact on the entire family,” she said. “I hear from parents who say that their babies are sleeping through the night for the first time since making their household chemical-free, and they themselves are calmer and more alert.”

But it is the cumulative effect of making a single household chemical-free that Berthold-Bond says she feels most excited about. “What we do at home really does have a global impact,” she said. “First of all, by not buying these products, we are not supporting a manufacturing process that creates stress, pollutes the air and dumps waste into the water. And if we eliminate things like oven cleaners, then we avoid them seeping from landfills, which is a problem now. Just imagine cleaning the bathtub with a soft, nontoxic scrub. What happens is, you realize that you’re comfortable having your kids in the bath, and around the cleaners—they can even use them! And then you realize this isn’t so bad for the septic either. And you’re not buying big amounts of cleaners, spending a lot of money, or supporting major corporations in polluting the environment. Then, you have a bath, and you realize you’re not ingesting any chemicals through your skin or your lungs. The next thing is, you realize you can clean the carpet with the same stuff you use to scrub the bathtub, so there’s a huge reduction in expenses. That’s got to improve your quality of life. And then you see how helpful it is, not just for your family, but for the earth.”

Annie Bethold-Bond
The executive producer of the healthy living channels at Care2.com, the number one online environmental network with more than 2.2 million members. Her Care2 Lifestyle e-newsletter offers eco-friendly tips for the home. Her alternative house-keeping guides are:

Clean and Green: The Complete Guide to Nontoxic and Environmentally Safe Housekeeping (Ceres Press, 1990). Most popular resource in the field, containing recipes
and lists of safe and unsafe commercial cleansers.

The Green Kitchen Handbook: Practical Advice, References, and Sources for Transforming the Center of Your Home Into Healthy, Livable Space; foreword by Meryl Streep (HarperCollins, 1997). “The ultimate in childproofing,” says Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet’s co-chair Wendy Gordon Rockefeller.

Better Basics for the Home: Simple Solutions for Less Toxic Living (Three Rivers, 1999). Recipes for cleansers, skin care, and hair care products; suppliers lists, packaging, and testing methods; and sustainable, non
toxic methods of pet care, gardening, pest control, and home renovation.

Clearly Natural
Clearly Natural Cleaning Products For Sound Minds, Sound Bodies, and Sound Homes is a line of nontoxic cleansers for glass, mold, floors, grime, wood, and all surfaces, ranging in size from 8- to 128-ounce bottles, priced from $2.10 to $56.90 (for a 445-ounce bottle of Wood Food Concentrate), and scented with Peppermint, Spray of Sunshine (orange and grapefruit), Mother’s Love (lavender), Jubilee (eucalyptus and lemon), Earthly Bliss (rich and woodsy), and Invigorating (tea tree blend). Also available are linen sprays, air fresheners, a volcanic rock odor-removing sponge, and a “brick” for removing hair and dust.

Reusable, canvas bags containing 8-ounce samples of each product cost $18.50. For more information and a complete price list, visit www.clearly-natural.com or write to Clearly Natural and Home Assistance Cleaning Service, 14 Clove Road, Fishkill, NY 12524; or call (845) 897-2914.