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.
People working with cleaning products, paints and inks in the
1970s through early 1990s were often regularly exposed to these
skin-absorbing reproductive hazard chemicals. And it occurs to
me, that it was at this time we also began to see the phenomenal
rise in autism and learning difficulties in our offspring. I
know every science writer seems to have a different theory about
why these illnesses are on the rise, but I tend not to think the
culprits are tiny amounts of pollutants in the environment or
minuscule amounts of mercury in vaccinations. Not when we've
used billions of pounds of glycol ethers and many other types of
toxic solvents, evaporating them into homes where children and
pregnant women often have 24-hour-per-day exposure.
Today your products are more likely to use the glycol ethers
containing propyl and butyl groups which are presumably less
toxic reproductive hazards, but toxic nonetheless. You are
especially likely to be exposed to 2-butoxyethanol. Many
manufacturers use 2- butoxyethanol because in 2004, the Bush
administration's EPA took this glycol ether off of its list of
Hazardous Air Pollutants (HAPs). Keep in mind a HAP chemical is
one that can participate in smog reactions or damage the
stratospheric ozone layer. The fact that butoxyethanol is not an
air pollutant is unrelated to the toxic effects it may have on
users.
This means if a manufacturer of a cleaning product wants to
advertise its product as one that does not containing chemicals
regulated by EPA, it is likely to use the butyl glycol ethers or
propyl glycol ethers that never were on the list. And if the
manufacture's definition of "green" is the absence of air
pollutants, it may even tout these products as "green."
The problem is, of course, that I have greatly oversimplified
the glycol ether problem in order to explain it. Actually there
are dozens of other more complex glycol ethers and related
chemicals like the glycol ether acetates that could be in your
products. And there is almost no available toxicity data on many
of these. Manufacturers can substitute these more complex glycol
ethers that have the same dizzying number of names and synonyms.
And now, more and more often, I see manufacturers withholding
the identities of their glycol ether solvents. For example, I
have six years worth of material safety data sheets on
All-Purpose Simple Green. Originally, it contained 6 percent
2-butoxyethanol which was about twice as much as many other fast
cleaners did at that time. This is probably why it worked so
well. Then the material safety data sheets showed the
2-butoxyethanol content had dropped to 3 percent. The latest
MSDS indicates there is only about 1 percent of this glycol
ether in it. But since the product cleans just as well as the
original formula did, and because the MSDS now says there are
other ingredients in the product that are not revealed, I have
to suspect there are some of these other glycol ethers in the
cleaner.
When a product cleans this fast, it ain't soap!
In fact, plain soap and water is a good substitute for the
solvent-containing cleaners if you are willing to put a little
elbow grease into the work and to rinse the soap from the
surface after cleaning. But if you feel you must use a fast
cleaner that can be sprayed on and wiped off in one operation,
then provide some ventilation such as a window exhaust fan
drawing air across your work area and exhausting it to the
outside. Remember, don't use rubber or vinyl gloves since these
are quickly penetrated by the glycol ethers without changing the
glove's appearance. Purchase some nitrile plastic gloves and
contact the manufacturer's technical service to find out how
often you should change your gloves since the glycol ethers will
penetrate even these gloves in time.